{"id":4503,"date":"2022-07-16T10:51:51","date_gmt":"2022-07-16T17:51:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=4503"},"modified":"2022-07-16T13:37:42","modified_gmt":"2022-07-16T20:37:42","slug":"carol-goodman-the-disinvited-guest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/carol-goodman-the-disinvited-guest\/","title":{"rendered":"Carol Goodman: The Disinvited Guest"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Carol Goodman has been killing it.\u00a0 She\u2019s writing the kind of standalone, psychologically suspenseful novels that are incredibly popular at the moment, but she\u2019s been doing it for twenty years.\u00a0 She\u2019s a tight storyteller and a smart one, and she\u2019s great with character and setting \u2013 in fact, she\u2019s the whole package.\u00a0 Her new novel, The Disinvited Guest, <\/em>posits that we have emerged from a worldwide pandemic, albeit briefly, and been plunged into another one.\u00a0 Her book is set very slightly in an unfortunately believable future.<\/p>\n

Taking a page from Christie\u2019s classic, And Then There Were None, <\/em>she gathers her characters and puts them on a boat where they are headed to a remote island in Maine to quarantine together.\u00a0 They have been quarantining, test for the virus before they get on the boat (familiar details for all of us), and when they arrive on the island their backstories begin to emerge.\u00a0 Unlike Christie\u2019s story, all of them know each other from college or as siblings or as long-standing acquaintances.\u00a0 The island belongs to Reed Harper and he\u2019s bringing along his wife, Lucy, his sister, and some college friends along with their partners\/spouses.\u00a0 Their guide is Mac, who has grown up with Reed, and is full of practical knowledge and skills that will help everything run smoothly.<\/p>\n

Lucy turns out to be the central narrator, and we see everything through her eyes, as she reevaluates friendships and connections through the lens of quarantine.\u00a0 She and Reed also seem to be on shaky ground though the canny Goodman keeps their relationship complicated and not-so-obvious as all that.\u00a0 Lucy has been stuck after writing a first book, but when she discovers an old journal left by a previous island resident it launches her into the past and back into creativity.<\/p>\n

The journal entries from the 1840\u2019s form a parallel narrative of a group of passengers on a ship from Ireland who hit this area of Maine\u2019s coast with a ship full of very ill people.\u00a0 The journal writer, a young doctor, cuts his teeth on taking care of these people, along with a group of \u201cGrey Ladies\u201d who live on the island and who have devoted themselves to charitable nursing, running a quarantine hospital.\u00a0 The island is also seemingly a nexus of witchcraft and superstition.<\/p>\n

The present-day islanders also feel this atmosphere of witchcraft, uncertainty and mysterious happenings that begin to drive them apart as they become suspicious of one another.\u00a0 As a reader you yourself begin to wonder just what might be real and what is imagined by people who are certainly under a great deal of stress. The journal entries and the present-day occurrences echo back and forth, creating a deepening atmosphere of suspense.<\/p>\n

When bodies start to fall, the tiny cast of characters has nowhere to look but at themselves, and secrets and long misunderstandings play a huge part on how things ultimately resolve.\u00a0 As in Christie\u2019s novel, the body count in high, and the ending is pretty bleak.\u00a0 This is a book to make a reader think, to keep you turning the pages, and to relish it\u2019s richly drawn characters.\u00a0 It\u2019s another wonderful read from Goodman\u2019s talented pen.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Carol Goodman has been killing it.\u00a0 She\u2019s writing the kind of standalone, psychologically suspenseful novels that are incredibly popular at the moment, but she\u2019s been doing it for twenty years.\u00a0 She\u2019s a tight storyteller and a smart one, and she\u2019s great with character and setting \u2013 in fact, she\u2019s the whole package.\u00a0 Her new novel, … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[873,330,870,869,871,615,872,874,291],"class_list":["post-4503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-and-then-there-were-none","tag-carol-goodman","tag-fever-ships","tag-maine-coast","tag-pandemic","tag-psychological-suspense","tag-quarantine","tag-the-disinvited-guest","tag-william-morrow"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4503","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4503"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4503\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4507,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4503\/revisions\/4507"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}