The String Diaries

May 5, 2014
British author Jones’s debut, an uneven paranormal thriller, fails to live up to the promise of its exciting first chapter. In present-day Wales, Hannah Wilde; her husband, Nate, who’s bleeding to death; and their nine-year-old daughter, Leah, are on the run from an unknown enemy. Chapter two flashes back to 1979 Balliol College, Oxford, where academic Charles Meredith, anxious about delivering a high-profile lecture, is unsettled by Nicole Dubois, an attractive woman who has taken over the library table he’s accustomed to using. Though Nicole continues to vex Charles, he finds himself fascinated with her, to the point of chasing her car at high speed when she flees town. The suspense builds, but not everyone will be satisfied with the eventual explanation for all these strange incidents. The sections set in the more distant past, starting in 1873 Hungary, drag, and the prose verges on the purple (e.g., “Teeth rained from his mouth, clattering onto the floorboards like ivory dice”).

If there's anything the frightenedcharacters in Jones' first novel learn, it's not to trust anyone unless theycan tell you what you got for your last birthday or what size shoes you wear.The book opens with a terrifiedHannah Wilde driving her badly bleeding husband, Nate, and young daughter,Leah, to a remote Welsh farmhouse in the dead of night to escape anunmentionable threat. Sebastien, an elderly neighbor with wicked eyes and afriendly dog, soon arrives to see what's up. Is he part of the evil,centuries-old plot against her family? Hannah points a shotgun at him first andasks questions later. Cut to Oxford in 1979, when Charles Meredith, a professorof medieval history, meets cute with Nicole Dubois, a French counterpart withsecrets to hide. Racing after her car in his, he causes a wreck that shemiraculously escapes-along with her scary mother. The third strand of the plottakes us back to late-19th-century Hungary, where a pent-up young man assumesother people's identities by submitting to the agony of shape-shifting. Backand forth things go, one story hooking up with the other. Give credit to Jonesfor coming up with a supernatural tale that's so ambitious and off the beatenpath, and for portraying Hannah and her brood so affectingly. But after anifty, nerve-wracking start, the novel loses its liveliness. For all the fearthat gets stirred up, the outcome could not be more mundane.An enjoyable ride, but the book runsout of energy and surprises just when it should be gaining steam. COPYRIGHT(1) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

June 1, 2014

Hannah Wilde is on the run with her injured husband and young daughter. Their enemy is a shape-shifting monster known as Jakab who has been hunting and murdering Hannah's family for generations. While seeking a refuge where her family can hide and hopefully recuperate, Hannah realizes that the only way they will ever be truly safe is if she can somehow stop Jakab once and for all. Debut author Jones weaves together various points of view (Hannah, her father, Jakab) as well as time lines in this supernatural tale of revenge and obsession. VERDICT Unfortunately, the main characters are two-dimensional, and fail to evolve over the course of the novel. Jones devotes his energy to pumping up the action at the expense of a logical or imaginative plot. Best for readers who want some mindless violence and a generic bad guy.--Laurel Bliss, San Diego State Univ. Lib.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from May 15, 2014
Hannah is on the run, her young daughter and her grievously wounded husband depending on her for their own survival. Her destination: a remote farmhouse in Wales, a place where she hopes no one will think to look for her. But, rather than a safe haven, the farmhouse could be her last stand against an evil that has pursued her family for nearly 200 years, an evil that can change its shape and take on the appearance of anyone it chooses . . . like someone Hannah might trust with her life. Told in alternating chapters set in the present day, in the late 1970s (when Hannah's father met her mother), and in the late 1870s, this is a scary and exciting horror novel that keeps us off-kilter, as we try to figure out what's going on until we're so involved in the story that we couldn't look away even if we tried. Rather than tell us everything we need to know about the history of Hannah's family at the very beginning of the book, as many writers might have, Jones doles out information a bit at a time, asking us to glean knowledge from dialogue and subtext. This is Jones' first novel, and you don't see many debuts more ambitious and memorable than this one.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)