The Woman in the Wall by Patrice Kindl

 

For the last book in my StoryGraph Onboarding Challenge, things took an unexpected turn. My final prompt was to read a book corresponding to my least preferred mood. According to StoryGraph, that mood is "relaxing," Honestly, that sounds about right. I like my books to be emotional or suspenseful more than relaxing. Anyway, I used StoryGraphs filters to search through my recommendations for a book tagged as relaxing. The first one mentioned was Anne of Green Gables. I want to use that for a future challenge though, so I went with the next one down - Tom's Midnight Garden. When the time came to actually sit and read it though, I made the odd discovery that the book wasn't available to download onto my Kindle and it was too close to the end of the year to order the paperback online. So, back to StoryGraph I went to find another selection. I scrolled around until I came across The Woman in the Wall, and here we are now.

This middle grades novel follows a young girl named Anna, who lives with her mother and two sisters in a sprawling Victorian mansion. Anna is extremely shy, to the point where she never leaves the house and prefers to remain out of the sight of others as much as possible. She entertains herself with many solitary hobbies like reading, sewing, and repair work around the house. She's never been to school and is terrified at the idea of doing so. When her mother starts to force the issue, she retreats into the walls.

She uses the knowledge she gained from making home repairs to create several passageways and hiding spaces within the walls of the house and begins living there. She watches her family through various peepholes and enjoys her solitude. She stays that way for several years, long enough for her family to start wondering whether she was a figment of their imagination all along. Eventually though, her quiet life is upended by the appearance of a note from a stranger stuck through a crack into one of her hiding places. Intrigued, she answers the note and receives a reply in return. Her secret correspondence soon brings her to a crossroads. She will need to decide whether to emerge from her hiding place and rejoin her family, or stay hidden and risk losing them entirely.

This was an odd little novel, and I mostly enjoyed it. The first half of the story was fantastic. As a quiet kid myself, I could strongly relate to Anna's shyness and desire to hide away within her house rather than face the outside world. Of course, her actions aren't realistic; no young child could carve out a series of passageways in a home and no mother would accept their child disappearing into the walls for several years. However, Kindl gets around this by imbuing the story with a dreamlike quality, almost like a fairy tale. Anna isn't just small and shy, she's nearly invisible. People have a hard time seeing her even when looking directly at her. Her mother and siblings have difficulty discerning her from the wallpaper sometimes. At one point, a visiting character mistakes her for a doll and puts her in her purse. There's not true magic in the story, but something about Anna feels magical, so it's easy enough to suspend your disbelief and go along with the story as she disappears into her secret rooms within the house.   

As the story goes on however, things deteriorated a bit for me. Once Anna starts communicating via the notes stuck into the wall, the dreamy qualities of the writing shift to become more realistic. Things become ordinary and move too quickly towards a rather bland ending. It's a shame, because I felt like the first part of the story was so quirky and unique. I wish the second half had held onto the magical realism it started off with. I'm sure the traditional ending was there for the book's intended middle grades audience, so I can't complain too much. It did seem like a shame that the plot concluded so conventionally though. It just didn't match up with the promising beginning.

So overall, I liked this novel well enough despite my disappointment with the conclusion. I suppose it did match its tag of being relaxing too, as it wasn't particularly challenging and was easy to read. Perhaps my dissatisfaction with parts of it were because it aligns with my least favorite mood. I was hoping for a bit more excitement I suppose. In any case, it was quirky enough that I did enjoy my experience with it, and I think other quiet, young readers will like it.

On a side note, with this novel, I am officially done with the StoryGraph Onboarding Reading Challenge! I didn't think I'd get a chance to actually finish each of the prompts, but I managed it in the end. I was pleasantly surprised by how well StoryGraph matched books to my reading preferences - they weren't all winners, but most of their recommendations were pretty good. I will definitely be continuing to use this website in the future.

Challenge Tally

StoryGraph Onboarding 2020 Challenge: 12/12 - Complete!

Total Books Read in 2020: 87