Customer Reviews

Light Beneath Ferns

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Anne Spollen certainly caught my attention and drew me in from the very first page. I didn't want to put the book down; I couldn't. Fortunately, the book isn't very long, and I finished it within a few hours.

Elizah Rayne and her mother move to the small town of Wenspaugh after her father takes off, abandoning them when his gambling addiction leads to charges of embezzlement. They settle in a house near the cemetery where her mother lands a job as the grounds caretaker. Quiet, brooding Elizah just wants to be left alone, but her mother insists on "helping" her cope with her "feelings" by sending Elizah to counseling sessions with the school's psychologist, Mrs. Daytner. Elizah's mother and Mrs. Daytner "force" social interactions upon Elizah, like: a Halloween party sleep over, ghost walks, and the high school's star basketball player, Mr. Popularity himself, Kyle, who coincidentally happens to be Daytner's nephew.

Wenspaugh secretly has centuries old Indian legends that, Elizah, accidentally stumbles onto when she finds a human jaw bone. From then on, her life is forever changed. She is inexplicably drawn to another teenage boy, Nathaniel Loomis, whom she must never tell anyone about. Nathaniel is dark, secretive, confusing, and completely enthralling to Elizah.

I definitely recommend this book for a quick read. However, I have to warn that there is no "happily-ever-after"; the hero does not "get the girl in the end", and no "mindset altering epiphany". Even though the story was well written, I felt dissatisfied when I finished reading it. It seemed to end abruptly with a lot of emptiness and unanswered questions; I felt like there was no real closure between Elizah and so many of the other characters: her father, Kyle, and most all, Nathaniel.

Heavy topics, which weigh on your heart, and play games with your mind. Beautifully written, yet I still feel like I don't 100% "get" the story, it's one of those that, I know my mind will be "chewing" on for days and maybe even weeks to come. I will never look at the world and those little things we often "miss" if were not looking closely enough for them, again - or at the very least I will try harder not to. It's tough to say much about Light Beneath Ferns, but it's one that I am glad I did not miss out on...but it's also one that might be hard to recommend, not because it's not fascinating in many, MANY ways, but rather because it is, fascinating I mean. I almost, would only recommend this one to strong people, whom are open to things that are different and not quite normal. I give Light Beneath Ferns a 4 mushrooms, and will be adding Anne Spollen to my list of favorites, I can't wait to read more from her, her writing is hypnotic.

LIGHT BENEATH FERNS is a beautifully written book that will chill you to your bones. If you appreciate poetic language and want to be spooked, this book is the one for you.

The strongest part of this book is its language. Anne Spollen strings words and descriptive language together in chains that I would never have thought possible--until I read it from her. The dreamy language transports you into half-mystical Wenspaugh and sets you right in the middle of Elizah's tiny high school, the graveyard, and the mysterious woods.

Elizah is not the protagonist for everyone. She's cynical to the point of being a little depressing, sarcastic to the point of being rude, and seems to change very little throughout the course of the novel. While I love and admire snarky, well-written dialogue, the number of times that Elizah clashed verbally with other characters quickly grew tiring for me.

Elizah is essentially a strong and well-developed protagonist, and may not have developed throughout the novel, but I was still surprised at the inconsistency of her character when it came to her interactions with Nathaniel. Many times I felt that the story was trying to force Nathaniel and Elizah upon one another, eschewing typical relationship development and trying to make it out that they had a connection before they even met. As a result, the romance was disappointing to me, their interactions based upon sensation but little substance.

LIGHT BENEATH FERNS is a story that revolves, surprisingly, not around the strong, albeit unchanging, characters, but rather the creepy element. It's an interesting mix of snarky dialogue, poetic language, and the paranormal. That unconventional combination of genre and stylistic techniques may be its selling point for some people. It could also be its downfall: many times I found myself struggling to fit the book's many parts together into one cohesive whole. Check it out, and see what it is for you.

The paranormal world is one of ups and downs...For example, you can read 6 or 7 fantastic books in a row and then BLAH you run into a swamp. You would think that over the years my love of reading and my somewhat educated mind would learn that anticipation is a horrendous habit, yet there I was 12:30am Monday morning, hopped up on caffeine and waiting not so patiently for the Kindle faeries to bring me a prize.

"Light Beneath Ferns" was supposed to be a smash, I didn't just decide this for myself, it has been splashed across the literary world for a few months now making several (including mine) lists of what to read in 2010. So as I sat on the edge of my bed, freezing my ass off cause my husband steals the covers, I opened the well worn cover on my Kindle and began to read.

The first chapter was brilliant. Spouting warnings like..."If death and the dead make you afraid, you better just stop reading and go take a nap." and I loved the heroin of the book, she was brooding, witty, sarcastic and an overall pain in the ass (kinda like me) but as for the remainder of the book? Yes, thanks....I think I'll go take that nap you suggested.

The concept of this book was captivating...very quiet girl who would rather spend time with bones than live people moves to town and meets mysterious disappearing boy. Great right? Just reading that sentence alone could spin a million different scenarios into your head, unfortunately...the book spent more time focusing on the emotional instability of Elizah and her screwed up family than it actually did with the "supposedly" scary scenarios.

Elizah likes to be alone, to her, talking is unnecessary and "fitting in" is the last thing on her list. After her father gambles all of the family's money away and then jumps trial, Elizah and her equally as quirky mother hoof it out of town only to turn around and take up residence in a old house that borders a cemetery. Elizah, wanting nothing more than a little peace and quiet wanders the property eventually running across a human jaw bone. With bones on her mind and a mother on her back Elizah set out to find the truth, but instead finds Nathaniel, a boy that speaks like a fortune cookie and dresses like a pauper.

After the first chapter the plot becomes a tangled mess of witty but sloppy writing. All the questions are... in the end answered, (some very abstractly) but with the book being so short (it took me only a few hours to read it) there was hardly time for proper character developement leaving me with a somewhat distant or lost feeling. "Spollen's" YA moments were lacking the push/pull that is necessary to keep an audience enthralled and the so called "scary" was almost completely non-existent. What was supposed to be a bright shining mark in this years literary catalog was nothing more than a mild jog through the woods with an overbearing guidance counselor and paragraphs of sloppy descriptives.

My suggestion? Save your money...if you require substance in your reads than this book is just to short to make any sort of lasting impression.

Happy reading my fellow Outcast and remember: if you find a random human bone in the ground just leave it there... picking it up and turning it into your pet is just plain weird.

This is a ghost story. An awesome, awesome ghost story. I can't really say what it is that I loved about this book so much. Maybe because it was a ghost story unlike anything I've ever read. It wasn't scary but at the same time it was kind of creepy. They're not ghosts that haunt and torment but remind and maybe love. It was just so unique that I honestly want to read it again just to soak it in even more.

Elizah is a loner by nature, which some people just can't grasp the concept of. People think that because someone actually chooses to not want to interact with people that there's something inherently wrong with them. The guidance counselor that Elizah goes to feels this is the case and not only she but Elizah's mother forces social interaction on her in a gross attempt to make her "normal." I can kind of relate to Elizah simply because I'm a loner myself. Not quite to the extent she is but I am looked at oddly by some people because I choose not to go out and socialize. Not to say I don't have friends; I'm just horrendously picky of the company I keep and bar hopping every weekend is not only a waste of my money, it's just not my scene. I have better things to do. Like talk to the voices in my head.

My favorite aspect of the story was the imagery of Nathaniel's village. Just the way it was described your mind couldn't really picture it without it being coated in a cold mist, as if looking through an early morning lens. You could see what it looked like but at the same time it was never really clear. You knew it looked like that colonial reproduction village just down stream but it fades in and out of the shadows as the sun casts them through the trees. Or doesn't. It was just so gripping and ethereal, tangible and intangible at the same time. I wanted to go there and see it for myself and just hoped I'd be able to get back. It leaves you (or you leave it) with a sense that just maybe if you took the wrong turn, you might not make it back. It's not scary but it is unsettling.

The adults in this book irk the crap out of me. I kind of half understand the mother's situation because she was married to a degenerate gambler for so long that was so afraid of people coming after him for money that he forced his family into solitude. I get that. But at the end of the day she was really self-involved and didn't so much care about how Elizah felt but more how people would view her because of Elizah's "abnormal" actions. She really wasn't a likable character and I'm not sure if she was supposed to be. She's damaged, yes, but I was in Elizah's head with her in every conversation she had with her mother going, "yeah, it's all about you, isn't it?" I felt it. I don't think you even needed to be an objective third party to know that.

The rest of the adults were kind of stock characters, cookie-cutter cut-outs that were way too into normal. But maybe that was the point. Maybe this overwhelming sense of suburbanite normalcy that ran throughout the book was a means to overcompensate for what they previously lived through. Sure, Dirk was too into playing the father-figure role and took it on way too quickly, but maybe that was the point. He's normal. Elizah's mother wanted normal and fast. I guess it fits.

I loved how Elizah's father was often compared to the actions of a ghost, flitting in and out of someone's life, neither there or not. A presence more than anything tangible. It described him perfectly; except for how much of a creep he really was. Big creep.

Nathaniel is the best part. It's pretty obvious from the beginning just what he is, and it's pretty easy to make the connections once the character start talking about local legends and Indian lore but I don't think it was meant to be subtle. But what was was Elizah's and Nathaniel's inherent connection to each other. That was subtle and I really liked how in the background it was kept. The notion of past lives was barely even scratched but it was there enough to make you question what was going on in that entire situation. It left a whole different, and separate, story lingering at the end that you wished was filled in but you're left to use just your imagination.

It's a sad love story and a sad friendship story really. The only people Elizah connects with are those in the cemetery and really, being a loner isn't all it's cracked up to be. But somehow the entire situation is settling for her. She accepts it for what it is and while she wants to ask more of it, she doesn't because she knows she won't get it.

It's a story about a loner that isn't as much of a loner as she thought she was. It's a ghost story and a love story. A story of loss and healing. But really, it's just a great story.

The quirky, macabre lovechild of Shirley Jackson and Ray Bradbury, Anne Spollen casts a spell of hopes, haunts, and hurts in her second coming-of-age novel. Eliza Rayne, our fourteen-year-old protagonist, experiences an adolescence both familiar and foreign. Her gambler father has abandoned her and her mother, other girls bully her at a slumber party, and a popular boy doesn't understand her but tries to kiss her anyway. But where other girls may keep diaries, Eliza creates jewelry from bird bones and studies graves in the cemetery that borders her home. One day Elizah finds a human jawbone in the river, and her whole world - and perception of it - shifts. Soon she's tangled in a romance with Nathaniel, who may or may not be a ghost. Nathaniel takes her on rides down the river in the middle of the night and walks her through a village where reflections linger longer than they should in mirrors. What's most impressive about Spollen's novel - besides her sharp, poetic prose - is her ability to break our hearts for Eliza not because she may be caught in a mystery between life and death but because we can all relate to her struggle for both self-identity and kinship. Her mother wants her to try harder to be "normal" and her guidance counselor pushes her to get more involved in "typical" school activities, but Elizah Rayne insists - through strength of spirit - on holding out for people and places that are aligned with her own beliefs and values. Even if those people are literal spirits - and those places are ghost-villages long gone save for rubble, memories, and dashes of magic.

I'm still unsure of what to think about this novel. There were parts of the story that I enjoyed reading and other parts that made me dislike the novel. I must say that Light Beneath Ferns is beautifully and uniquely written. Spollen's descriptive language set a creepy feel to the book, which is one of the things I enjoyed most.

I do feel that the language could either make or break Light Beneath Ferns. Considering the story revolves mostly around the setting and not so much the characters, there is a lot of descriptions and not a lot of dialogue between characters. At times, I found myself struggling to put the story's many puzzle pieces together to form the big picture.

The thing that bothered me the most was Elizah. Most of the time I just wanted to slap her. I found her to be rude and a little depressing. She has family issues (just like everyone else) and I can somewhat see why she may act the way she does, but I really didn't care for her negative personality, which didn't seem to change much throughout the novel.

Light Beneath Ferns has its good parts and bad parts but overall it was an okay novel.

Light Beneath Ferns is a very beautifully written book. The author, Anne Spollen, has a definite way with words, stringing together a maze of lyrical, meaningful, and poignant words for a story with a deep and emphatic purpose. I'd have to say the language in this book is really the best part. It's easy to read, and it flows.

The protagonist, Elizah, was a bit unlikeable for me, though I'm sure it's different for everyone. She is extremely cynical, a tad depressing, and completely absorbed in her dark, uncomfortable thoughts. While I liked her sarcasm (probably because it's my forte), I often found her to be almost distasteful and rude. That said, she had a lot of witty, searing dialogue with Nathaniel that I found very entertaining to read. That said, often times, I felt as though the dialogue was strained between both Nathaniel and Elizah, and I'm not sure I saw a true character progression through the novel, which frustrated me.

Light Beneath Ferns is a cross-genre book, merging the paranormal with a tasteful YA story. That, plus the dialogue and the beautiful imagery Anne Spollen wove through the book made it a lovely read, albeit not my favourite. All in all, I think this was a strong book, though I'm not sure I would re-read it. I give it a strong 3.5 out of 5.

"Vivienne" (East Rockaway, Queens) -
What drew me to this novel was having read Anne Spollen's previous novel, "The Shape of Water." I considered that book a lyrical masterpiece, as did many who read it. "Light Beneath Ferns," is not as densely lyrical, yet I still find Spollen's language evocative, and her images appropriately diaphanous and chilling. This story, set in the actual village of New Paltz, NY (the name is changed)is grounded by the voice of the main character, Elizah. She is a well-conceived character with a crisp and strong voice, a voice younger teens will immediately connect with. When her mother and a school counselor (the mother's friend)set her up with a school athlete as a boyfriend, only Elizah sees that the boy is attracted to her only as a conquest - he sees her rebuff as something to be "won" rather than respected. And that's the strength of this story: Elizah "sees" what others, particularly the adults that surround her, cannot. Teens everywhere will respond to the atmospheric moodiness of the setting, the unwarranted arrogance of the adults, and the teen protagonist's perceptive abilities. A fast, good read that kept me turning pages.

I have no idea why this book is rated so highly (albeit by less than 10 people who actually took the time to review). At first, everything seems so promising. I thought I was in for a poetic ghost story told through the sharp and sarcastic voice of a quiet teenage girl living on the edge of cemetery in a new town.

Instead, I found a town filled of annoying 2D characters created soley to prop up the main narrator - a narrator so antisocial and self-consumed that she is impossible to like even when surrounded by the empty-shelled characters of her mother, father, and fellow students. And really, a school counselor who tells everything you say to your mother and your boyfriend?? Very professional.

The ghost acts stereotypically vague to the point of being utterly boring. Of course, the main character is too slow to pick up on his revealing false starts and generally ghost-like behaviour, even though everyone in the book seems to be convenienty chatting with her about the undead.

Even though the book is rather short, it feels painfully prolonged as the same patterns repeat over and over. Mom throws a party - Narrator hates said party - Narrator obsesses over bone and her own antisocial tendencies without actually accomplishing anything with the obvious clues that have been handed to her.

The only reason I give this book 2 stars instead of 1 is because the setting was done well. I certainly would never recommend it to another person (living or dead), but it isn't the absolute worst thing I've read recently.

I must commend the beautiful cover design. And the texture of the paper used for it as well. Maybe that's strange to say, but it feels nicer than usual.