Arcadia Falls [Hardcover]

Carol Goodman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 9, 2010

There once was a girl who liked to pretend she was lost. . . .
 
Meg Rosenthal is driving toward the next chapter in her life. Winding along a wooded roadway, her car moves through a dense forest setting not unlike one in the bedtime stories Meg used to read to her daughter, Sally. But the girl riding beside Meg is a teenager now, and has exchanged the land of make-believe for an iPod and some personal space. Too much space, it seems, as the chasm between them has grown since the sudden, unexpected death of Meg’s husband.

    Dire financial straits and a desire for a fresh start take Meg and Sally from a comfortable life on Long Island to a tucked-away hamlet in upstate New York: Arcadia Falls, where Meg has accepted a teaching position at a boarding school. The creaky, neglected cottage Meg and Sally are to call home feels like an ill portent of things to come, but Meg is determined to make the best of it—and to make a good impression on the school’s dean, the diminutive, elegant Ivy St. Clare.

St. Claire, however, is distracted by a shocking crisis: During Arcadia’s First Night bonfire, one of Meg’s folklore students, Isabel Cheney, plunges to her death in a campus gorge. Sheriff Callum Reade finds Isabel’s death suspicious, but then, he is a man with secrets and a dark past himself.

Meg is unnerved by Reade’s interest in the girl’s death, and as long-buried secrets emerge, she must face down her own demons and the danger threatening to envelop Sally. As the past clings tight to the present, the shadows, as if in a terrifying fairy tale, grow longer and deadlier.

In Arcadia Falls, award-winning author Carol Goodman deftly weaves a mesmerizing narrative of passion: for revenge, for art, for love.
 

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Carol Goodman on Arcadia Falls: The Red Rose Girls and the Three A.M. Demons

There were two threads that went into the origin of Arcadia Falls. One rather academic and intellectual, one deeply personal.

The first came from an exhibit I saw at the Norman Rockwell Museum in the fall of 2003. The exhibit featured three women artists: Jessie Wilcox Smith, Violet Oakley, and Elizabeth Shippen Green. The women had met at the turn of the 19th century in a class at Drexel University taught by Howard Pyle. Pyle encouraged the three women to throw in their lot together because, he said, "Once a woman marries, that's the end of her." When they moved into an old inn called The Red Rose, Pyle began to call them the Red Rose Girls.

The exhibit was inspiring for its luminous illustrations and paintings--many of which I recognized from the pictures I'd hung on my daughter's nursery walls--but also for its story. These three women had found a way to be artists in an era that prohibited women from taking life drawing classes because it was considered to make them unfit for their true vocations as wives. Although the partnership eventually broke up when Eilizabeth Shippen Green married, Violet Oakley and Jessie Wilcox Smith went on to work as artists for the rest of their lives.

Implanted in my mind was the germ of an idea for a novel about a group of women artists who band together to pursue their art outside of the confines of marriage, which would have to be a historical piece because, after all, women could have families and pursue artistic careers in the present. Right?

At some point in the story's development, while I wrote other novels and my daughter grew up, I realized that I wanted to juxtapose a modern story against the historical one. The character of Meg Rosenthal, traveling upstate with her teenaged daughter Sally, emerged, according to my notebooks, in 2007, and it came out of a very visceral fear. Specifically that kind of fear that wakes you up at three in the morning and then keeps you awake, alone in the dark, spinning out worst-case scenarios until dawn. My yoga teacher told me once that there's a tradition in Vedic mythology that 3 a.m. is when you're most vulnerable to demons. When my daughter was little those demons gave me nightmares about losing her in crowded department stores. When she grew into a teenager I’d wake in the middle of the night with images of car wrecks and drug addiction, unplanned pregnancies and depression. There are ways you can lose a child who's sitting right in front of you. In fact, you are losing them, little by little, to adulthood. The child you knew is slowly vanishing, hopefully to become an adult you recognize.

I suppose it was these fears that made me think about the changeling story. Of all fairy tales it's perhaps the most horrifying to a parent--the idea that your child could be snatched away from you and replaced by a wooden (in some of the stories the replacement is actually made of wood), unfeeling creature that looks like your child but isn't.

The changeling story is about infants, but it occurred to me during one of my 3 a.m. bouts that it could describe the experience of raising a teenager. What parent of a teenager hasn't felt at some moment that the sweet child who doted on your every word has been replaced by a touchy, moody, eye-rolling teenager?

And so, I started Arcadia Falls with a mother and a daughter in a car. The mother, Meg, is trying to cajole and humor her daughter Sally, who's furious at her mother for moving her before her junior year of high school. Sally, plugged into her iPod, grows more distant the more her mother tries to connect. Because that to me is the hardest thing about raising a teenager. When they're little you know how to comfort them, but when they're older and in pain sometimes it seems like you only make it worse trying to comfort them. Sometimes you have to step back and let them find their own way out of their pain. It's like standing on the edge of a dark forest and watching your child enter the woods armed only with a covered basket and a handful of bread crumbs and hoping they'll find their way to the other side. All you can do is hope they remember the lessons you've taught them--be kind to helpless creatures, don't trust wolves dressed up as men, but do trust in your own strength and bravery.

Meg Rosenthal is afraid that she's failed to teach Sally that last lesson, precisely because she herself has sacrificed a piece of herself to be a good mother. She abandoned her own dreams of being an artist in order to be a mother.

So, I suppose the central question in Arcadia Falls is whether it's possible to be a good parent and an artist. Art--at least the kind I know first hand, writing--requires a tremendous investment of time and attention. When I'm absorbed in writing a book the world I'm creating sometimes seems more real than the world around me.

Over the last 15 years I think I've balanced being a writer and a mother pretty well. I've written nine books and never once forgot to pick my daughter up from school. (I did forget to pick up the dog from the groomers once, but that's another story.) I may have been distracted now and then, but I've also spent hours talking to my daughter about writing and storytelling, learning as much from her as she's learned from me. I think that being a parent has enriched my ability to write--and I hope that being a writer has made me at least a more interesting parent to her--but it's always been a balancing act. One I consider myself lucky to have been able to even attempt.

---

From Publishers Weekly

Goodman (The Night Villa) delivers the goods her fans expect in this atmospheric and fast-moving gothic story: buried secrets, supernatural elements, and a creepy setting. Following the death of her husband, Meg Rosenthal accepts a job teaching at an upstate New York boarding school and moves there with her teenage daughter, Sally. The school, Arcadia Falls, also happens to be central to her thesis, which focuses on the two female coauthors of fairy tales: Vera Beecher, who founded the school, and her friend Lily Eberhardt, who died mysteriously in 1947. While the campus is bucolic, school life proves anything but—Meg thinks she sees ghosts and Arcadia's brightest and most ambitious student, Isabel Cheney, is found dead in a ravine. Feeling Sally drifting further from her each day, Meg finds refuge in Lily's preserved diary and begins to unravel the secrets behind Isabel's death. Goodman doesn't do anything new, but her storytelling is as solid as ever, and the book is reliably entertaining. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Ballantine Books (March 9, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345497538
• ISBN-13: 978-0345497536
• Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 1.2 x 9.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (88 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #718,359 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Carol Goodman graduated from Vassar College, where she majored in Latin. After teaching Latin for several years, she studied for an MFA in Fiction. Her writing has been published in a number of literary magazines. She currently teaches writing and works as a writer-in-residence. She lives in Long Island, USA.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Boarding School Gothic, March 25, 2010

By 

LH422 (Washington, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Arcadia Falls (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

This book bears distinct resemblance to Goodman's earlier Lake of Dead Languages. Both take place at elite private schools in the northeast. Both books' main characters are single mothers and teachers who move to these schools to teach under difficult circumstances. And both books rely heavily on student and faculty obsession with old myths. In Arcadia Falls the single mother in question is Meg Rosenthal, recently widowed folklore scholar, who moves herself and her daughter to a remote region of upstate New York to take a much-needed teaching job at the Arcadia School. The school began its life as a feminist artist colony, whose founders wrote and illustrated fairy tales. The school's founders, Vera Beecher and Lily Eberhart, are professional and romantic partners, but with the arrival of a charismatic sculptor at the colony, Lily finds herself in the midst of a troublesome love triangle. The consequences of this triangle will lead to Lily's death. It quickly becomes apparent to Meg that the Arcadia School is a dangerous and deadly place,not just in Lily's time, but in her own, too. The books is the retelling of three stories, that of Meg and Sally Rosenthal, that of Vera Beecher and Lily Eberhart, and the fairy tale, The Changeling Girl. Goodman does an excellent job of weaving these tales together. While the book does bear some similarities to some of Goodman's earlier work, it is not merely the same story retold. I was captivated with discovering who or what was responsible for Lily Eberhart's death. I did find that after the circumstances of Lily's death were revealed the book was neither as compelling, nor as plausible. The ending is not the most satisfying, but this was still an enjoyable and suspenseful read.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars THE ART OF ATMOSPHERIC WRITING, March 20, 2010

By 

Red Rock Bookworm (St. George Utah) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Arcadia Falls (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

Forced by the untimely death of her husband to accept a teaching position at an isolated East Coast boarding school called ARCADIA, Meg Rosenthal finds herself immersed in the turmoil surrounding two deaths at the school. One death, that of the schools founder Lily Eberhardt, happened years ago while the other occurs during Megs first weeks at the school.

Through the accidental discovery of a journal written by Lily, Meg uncovers not only the history of ARCADIA's inception as an artist colony for women and its later metamorphosis into a private girls' school, she also becomes privy to the unusual relationship between the schools original founders. With elements of pagan ceremonies and witchcraft not to mention the revelation of long buried secrets, author Carol Goodman immerses the reader in an atmosphere teeming with a sinister and malevolent glow.

For readers with a taste for tales of love and revenge told with a gothic flair ARCADIA FALLS will more than satisfy their reading palate. This is primarily a story of relationships.....those between friends, between mothers and daughters, between students and teachers. It is also a taut allegory imbued with fairy tales and folklore that mask actual social and personal circumstances. This story within a story moves back and forth between the present and the past, as secrets long hidden are resurrected posing imminent danger to our protagonist Meg Rosenthal and her teenaged daughter, Sally. Displaying her storytelling prowess, Ms. Goodman has given us a cast of multi-faceted and well defined, but not necessarily likable, characters and a final reveal containing a myriad of twists and turns plus enough suspense to keep her readers mesmerized. 31/2 stars

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Nicely Gothic set-up; Cliches follow, April 19, 2010

By 

J. L. Rubenking (Cleveland, OH USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Arcadia Falls (Hardcover)

Meg Rosenthal, widowed nearly a year ago and fallen on less than prosperous times, takes a teaching job at a forest-surrounded former arts colony, now boarding school, in an upstate New York town called Arcadia Falls. She brings along with her her daughter Sally, who has become withdrawn and morose since her father's death.

Meg is fascinated by the school's founders, Vera and Lily, who collaborated on fairy tales and whose companionship was severed by Lily's untimely death when she fell into a deep clove on the night she was supposedly running off with her lover. Meg teaches folklore, and finds herself immediately surrounded by a student body in love with pagan celebrations and beliefs in the 'white woman' said to haunt the trees of the school grounds. The school is led by the reticent Ivy St. Clare, who is "always watching," as one character warns Meg. It's all very Gothic in setting and mood, with the woods lending themselves nicely to the dusty and even creepy disrepair of the place.

On the night of the school year's opening festivities, a promising young woman falls, or is pushed, to her death in the same place that Lily died some 50 years before. Meg finds herself drawn into the investigation and drawn to the rugged town sheriff too, even as she sees Sally opening up to a new group at school and drawing even farther away from her mom. Meg discovers the long-missing journal that Lily had left behind in the cottage she has been given, and quickly (but not too quickly or we would actually figure things out) starts to learn the real history of the Arcadian arts circle and Lily and Vera's bond, along with its secrets.

I realized I have read all of Goodman's books, and most are good enough reads, but I found this one rather cliche and tiresome. There are twists and turns, and the (sigh) expected romance between Meg and the sheriff. There is slight surprise in the predictable ending, and then an are-you-kidding-so-unnecessary additional twist to round the book out in the closing chapter. Ho-hum.