A Sudden Light

July 7, 2014
In a complete change of pace from his dog-centric The Art of Racing in the Rain, Stein transports the reader to Riddell House, a 100-year-old mansion made entirely of wood overlooking Puget Sound. Jones Riddell and his 14-year-old son, Trevor, move there following the failure of Jones’s business and his ensuing separation from Trevor’s mother. Jones has come to Riddell House to help his younger sister, Serena, persuade their Alzheimer’s-afflicted father to sell the family land, which is worth a fortune, to housing developers. But supernatural forces stand in the way of the deal. Clever Trevor, as he is called, begins to see ghosts and have visions. Researching the history of the Riddell clan—rapacious timber barons—he finds that it is rife with sexual secrets, incest, illness, and even madness, which forces him to realize that his dream of seeing his family whole again might come at too great a cost. With its single setting and small cast of characters (ghosts not included), the story’s feeling of claustrophobia adds to the tension. Stein dramatizes the various tensions between his characters well, although narrator Trevor comes off as a tad precocious for 14. The history of the Riddell family fails to shock after a while, even as events in the present lead to the tragic denouement.

September 15, 2014

Stein's best-selling The Art of Racing in the Rain was successfully, if unconventionally, narrated by a dog. This time around, the author tries channeling gifted 14-year-old Trevor Riddell, with mixed results. Though the story is told in part as flashbacks by an older, wiser Trevor, he says and does things as his younger self that just don't feel authentic or consistent. It's 1990, and Trevor and his father Jones arrive at the Riddell family estate at the northern edge of Seattle. Built by Trevor's great-great-grandfather, a ruthless timber baron, Riddell House and the surrounding forested acreage are at the crux of a family struggle. Jones and his unusual sister, Serena, want to develop the property and regain their lost fortunes, but Samuel, their father, is reluctant to leave the home where his wife died. Trevor, sometimes precocious and observant and other times dim, is visited by a persistent ghost who's intent on shining light on everyone's hidden motivations. VERDICT While this purported ghost tale starts strong, an earnest environmental message and other philosophizing bogs it down in a silly, overly dramatic plot. Critical readers looking for a complex, chilling tale should try Rebecca Makkai's The Borrowers instead. [See Prepub Alert, 4/14/14.]--Christine Perkins, Whatcom Cty. Lib. Syst., Bellingham, WA

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from September 1, 2014
There's more than one way to be haunted. In Stein's first novel since his popular The Art of Racing in the Rain (2008), a 14-year-old named Trevor uncovers the dark mysteries surrounding the mansion built by his great-great-grandfather, a timber baron in the Pacific Northwest. While Trevor's father is ostensibly there to sell the property and position himself to save his faltering marriage, Trevor begins to suspect there's a soul at the mansion determined to see it returned to nature. Stuck in the house with his demented grandfather and flirtatious aunt, the perceptive teenager learns about his family's legacy, his forebears' avarice causing damage as it echoes down the generations. A sense of intrigue pervades Trevor's quest to discover more about the house and its history, and Stein succeeds in capturing both heavy and heady emotions. The sentiments resonate so well that readers will likely overlook the somewhat jarring journal entries written like book chapters, complete with dialogue. Although the estate comes with all the requisite creaks, hidden doors, and tumbledown grandeur of a standard haunted house, there's much more to this story than the average spooky tale. With a sincere narrator, dizzying flights of prose, and tightly bound relationships, the supernatural is almost beside the point. Less spine-tingling than heart-wrenching, A Sudden Light is haunting in all the right ways.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)