Minna and Trenton are siblings with a sizeable age gap, and when their father dies, they head to his rambling and slightly ramshackle country house to make arrangements. Two ghosts are first person narrators, and then Oliver mixes things up a bit by slipping into a third person narration for the various humans involved. Oliver also breaks her mold a bit by using both humans and ghosts to tell the story.
Like her other novels, Rooms has multiple points of view, but unlike the pernicious and ever-pervasive present tense used in YA, this one actually dips into the past tense. With Rooms, it's as if she heard my plea. I've enjoyed her books, including Delirium trilogy (incidentally, my review of which has had more hits on this blog than any other) and Panic, but I've always said that I wished she would write a book for adults that had more nuance than her books for teens. I've read a number of Lauren Oliver's books for YA, but Rooms is her first book written expressly for an adult audience. When a new ghost appears, and Trenton begins to communicate with her, the spirit and human worlds collide-with cataclysmic results.Įlegantly constructed and brilliantly paced, Rooms is an enticing and imaginative ghost story and a searing family drama that is as haunting as it is resonant.Forgive my rustiness, but I read this book on vacation back in July and neglected to review it then, so this review will be necessarily brief and vague. The living and dead are each haunted by painful truths that will soon surface with explosive force. Though their voices cannot be heard, Alice and Sandra speak through the house itself-in the hiss of the radiator, a creak in the stairs, the dimming of a light bulb. Jostling for space, memory, and supremacy, they observe the family, trading barbs and reminiscences about their past lives. Prim Alice and the cynical Sandra, long dead former residents bound to the house, linger within its claustrophobic walls. His estranged family-bitter ex-wife Caroline, troubled teenage son Trenton, and unforgiving daughter Minna-have arrived for their inheritance.īut the Walkers are not alone. Wealthy Richard Walker has just died, leaving behind his country house full of rooms packed with the detritus of a lifetime.
The New York Times bestselling author of Before I Fall and the Delirium trilogy makes her brilliant adult debut with this mesmerizing story in the tradition of The Lovely Bones, Her Fearful Symmetry, and The Ocean at the End of the Lane-a tale of family, ghosts, secrets, and mystery, in which the lives of the living and the dead intersect in shocking, surprising, and moving ways.
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