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Book Review: The Only One Left by Riley Sager
A Gothic chiller about a young caregiver assigned to work for a woman accused of a Lizzie Borden-like massacre decades earlier.
Summary:
Now reduced to a schoolyard chant, the Hope family murders shocked the Maine coast one bloody night in 1929. While most people assume seventeen-year-old Lenora was responsible, the police were never able to prove it. Other than her denial after the killings, she has never spoken publicly about that night, nor has she set foot outside Hope’s End, the cliffside mansion where the massacre occurred.
It’s now 1983, and home-health aide Kit McDeere arrives at a decaying Hope’s End to care for Lenora after her previous nurse fled in the middle of the night. In her seventies and confined to a wheelchair, Lenora was rendered mute by a series of strokes and can only communicate with Kit by tapping out sentences on an old typewriter. One night, Lenora uses it to make a tantalizing offer—I want to tell you everything.
As Kit helps Lenora write about the events leading to the Hope family massacre, it becomes clear there’s more to the tale than people know. But when new details about her predecessor’s departure come to light, Kit starts to suspect Lenora might not be telling the complete truth—and that the seemingly harmless woman in her care could be far more dangerous than she first thought.
Review:
I’m from New England so grew up with the Lizzie Borden jump-rope rhyme, and I’m a long-time fan of Riley Sager’s works. So I put myself on the hold list for this at my library as soon as the title was announced. Sager’s works play with thriller tropes. This one is more of a loose play. Ever since the original murders people have debated whether or not she was actually the murderer. So that’s what is at play here – how we treat others when the evidence points toward them but not conclusively enough for a sentencing.
For the majority of the book, I thought I had the murderer figured out, and not too many twists happened. the majority of the twists come in a giant pile right at the end. That said, I was partially right about what I thought from the beginning. I wasn’t 100% there, but I was partially there. I wanted to be slightly more surprised than I was. Although the pile of twists at the end did increase my satisfaction regardless.
The 1983 setting was a little weakly done. It felt more like a plot device to avoid the inconvenience of cell phones and characters texting each other than a true love letter to the 1980s. The 1980s was like sprinkles on top instead of what the story was built upon. I also personally didn’t understand why Kit was so afraid of a bed-bound elderly woman. Even assuming she had committed three murders decades ago. A murderer who has been bed-bound for decades and is now elderly is nothing to be afraid of. So the fear factor was lower for me.
One thing that annoyed me was the murder jump-rope rhyme in the book. The cadence was off, making it impossible to actually chant properly for a jump-rope game. This is easily seen in the first two lines. The Lizzie Borden one is this:
Lizzie Borden took an axe
Gave her mother forty whacks
Each line is precisely 7 syllables long, plus the accents come every other syllable and in both lines the strong syllable comes first.
LIZzie BORden TOOK an AXE
GAVE her MOTHer FORty WHACKS
In contrast, this is the first two lines of the jump-rope rhyme written for this book:
At seventeen Lenora Hope
Hung her sister with a rope
The first line is 8 syllables, and the second one is 7. The second one’s accents work, but the first line’s don’t.
at SEVenTEEN leNORa HOPE
HUNG her SISter WITH a ROPE
It just simply doesn’t work as a jump-rope rhyme because jump-rope rhymes start with a strong syllable, and the lines are the same length as each other. They’re meant for keeping rhythm for the jumpers and the turners. Children on a schoolyard would have changed it to make it work, even if it meant changing a detail to be inaccurate. For example:
SIXteen OLD leNORa HOPE
HUNG her SISter WITH a ROPE
This makes it even more like the Lizzie Borden rhyme, in fact, because that one is slightly inaccurate for the sake of the rhyme scheme. It was Lizzie’s stepmother who was killed, not her mother.
In any case, the rhyme is repeated a lot in the book, and always at least the first line, and it made me cringe every time it came up.
The thriller itself was still quite enjoyable anyway but it would have jumped up to remarkable with this issue fixed and a more thoroughly shocking twist. A fun new read from a popular thriller author.
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4 out of 5 stars
Length: 385 pages – average but on the longer side
Source: Library
Buy It (Amazon or Bookshop.org)
Book Review: Maplecroft by Cherie Priest (Series, #1)
Summary:
“Lizzie Borden took an axe; gave her mother forty whacks….”
Any New Englander knows the nursery rhyme based on the true crime story of Mr. and Mrs. Borden who were murdered with an axe in 1892. In spite of being tried and acquitted for the murders, their daughter (in the case of Mrs. Borden, step-daughter), was widely believed to actually be responsible for the murders. In this book, she definitely was, but maybe not for the reasons you might think.
A darkness is trying to take over Fall River, Massachusetts, and Lizzie and her ailing sister Emma are all that might stand between the town and oblivion, with Lizzie’s parents being the first casualties in the battle.
Review:
I grew up chanting the nursery rhyme about Lizzie Borden the first half of which is quoted above (this perhaps says an awful lot about New Englanders, but I digress), and I also love tales from the Lovecraft universe, which also originated in New England. When I heard about this book that mashed up the two, I put it on my wishlist. Lo and behold, my future sister-in-law, who had never even seen my wishlist, bought it for me for Christmas last year. I thought this would be the perfect read for the fantasy challenge, and although it was a bit different than what I was expecting, I still enjoyed the mix of Lovecraft and women’s history that Priest has woven and am eagerly anticipating reading the sequel.
The story is told through a combination of first person accounts from Lizzie, Emma, and Nance, diary-style entries by their neighbor doctor, letters, police and fire reports, and first person ramblings of a professor from Miskatonic University (another Lovecraft element). Some readers may be put off by the combination of first person perspectives, but I’ve always enjoyed this style, particularly when it includes things like letters and police reports. I felt that it was one of the strengths of the book, and I also particularly enjoyed getting to see both Emma’s and Lizzie’s perspectives, as well as that of Lizzie’s lover, Nance.
The Lovecraft mash-up basically is that some sort of Dark One in the deep is out to turn everyone on the seacoast either into worshippers or victims or literally turn them into monstrous ones who live in the deep. Emma and Lizzie’s parents were among the first to begin succumbing to this infection and that is why Lizzie had to kill them. Lizzie and Emma now are conducting research, trying to figure out how to prevent the Dark One from actually rising up. This is all extremely Lovecraftian, including the fact that some of these developments don’t make a ton of sense, but things just don’t make sense in the dark fantasy world of Lovecraft, so I was ok with that. Readers new to the world of Lovecraft might be a bit more frustrated by how inexplicable most things to do with the Dark Ones and the deep are, however.
I particularly enjoyed how Priest explores how societal and cultural norms of 1890s New England affects women’s lives. Emma could be a scientist now that women are being accepted into colleges, but she chooses to instead write her scientific papers under a male pseudonym because she believes she would never garner respect otherwise. Lizzie and Nance are in love and must hide it, although Lizzie often feels why should she bother when she is already disgraced after the trial. The clashes between Lizzie and Emma regarding both her affair with Nance and the fact that Lizzie believes in trying out magical and fantastical defenses against the Dark One whereas Emma believes purely in science are interesting reading. They are two very different people who are thrust together both by virtue of being siblings and by the fact that as women in the 1890s their lives are limited.
On the other hand, in spite of liking the characters of the neighbor doctor and the Miskatonic professor and enjoying the exploration of Lizzie’s and Emma’s relationship and getting to see some of Emma’s character, I couldn’t help but feel that Lizzie didn’t get a chance to be enough in this book. Lizzie Borden is such a looming large figure in local history, even on the book cover she presents as a bad-ass in a period skirt holding a bloody axe. In contrast in the book she spends a lot of time dealing with her annoying sister. Similarly, I’m not a fan of the fact that Lizzie does very little of rescuing herself in this book, which is, I believe, if the historic Lizzie really did kill her parents, what she actually did in real life. To me Lizzie has always been a woman who said fucking enough and took an axe and dealt violently and finally with her problems. Whereas in the book, she starts off off-screen that way (we don’t actually see her kill her parents) and she sort of tapers off. Much as I enjoyed seeing her messed up relationship with Emma, I couldn’t help but feel it would have ended more powerfully if she’d said fucking enough and whacked Emma through the skull for being such an insufferable bitch and in the way all the time. This was my main issue with the book.
My second, more minor, issue is that I felt the plot takes too long to build up to actual horrifying events and/or murders. The first murders, as I mentioned before, happened off-screen. The beginning of the book then is a build-up of a lot of tension with not much actual gore or murder occurring. I should mention that I was watching “The Lizzie Borden Chronicles” on tv at the same time as I was reading this book. In that show, Lizzie kills at least one person an episode. Now, some of that gets over the top, but it does get the idea of the pacing one would expect from this type of story right. More mayhem. More murder. More danger. More often.
On a positive note, the scenes between Lizzie and Nance are beautifully done, and while I was frustrated to see Lizzie turn a bit into a lovesick fool, I was very glad it was happening with Nance. Their relationship and dynamic jumped off the page and really brightened up the book for me.
The set-up at the end of the book for the sequel is well-done, although I’m uncertain how the series can proceed forward so far removed from the actual historical event, I am excited to read it and see what happens.
Overall, this Lovecraft fantastical take on the Lizzie Borden of history and what led to the murders of her parents hits just the right note for Lovecraft fans. Readers who are new to the dark fantasy world of Lovecraft may be a bit surprised by the slow burn of the horror and how much of it winds up not making much sense, but those readers who can embrace this style of dark fantasy will enjoy it. Those looking for a bad-ass Lizzie should be aware that this Lizzie only acts when absolutely necessary and then with restraint, and they should perhaps tune into the made for tv movie Lizzie Borden Took An Ax instead. Recommended to fans of Lovecraft who are interested in getting some local history woven in to the New England settings they are familiar with from the Lovecraft universe.
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4 out of 5 stars
Length: 435 pages – average but on the longer side
Source: Gift
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This work by Amanda Nevius is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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