A Series Of (Un)Fortunate Reviews

The Glass Demon is Helen Grant's follow up to The Vanishing of Katharina Linden , a book previously reviewed on this blog back in June.   The Glass Demon is every bit as gripping as Grant's debut, starting from the killer first lines.   Demon is a dark and sinister, modern myth, and, like its predecessor, takes place in Germany.  Grant is expert at evoking the claustrophobia and clique-ishness of small town life where locals close ranks against outsiders and rumors and gossip fly like nobody's business. In the wake of a career setback, Lin's father uproots the family from their home in England and packs them off to the remote German countryside to spend the year living in a rundown castle in the middle of a forest.  When the family arrives, they come across an old man lying dead in an orchard, the ground around him littered with shattered glass, and when Lin's father refuses to report the corpse to the police, the reader knows this cannot bode well.  Indeed...

The Vanishing of Katharina Linden is Helen Grant's debut novel; her follow up, The Glass Demon ,  drops this month.  I had to get The Vanishing through Interlibrary Loan because it is not available in county.  It is a great book, was worth the wait, and I hope some library in county gets a copy sometime.  Scratch that--I hope more that somebody gets The Glass Demon in county because I also want to read that and will have to wait six months before I can request it through ILL otherwise (hint, hint). The setting is small town Germany in 1999; the story is narrated by a girl many years after the events of the year she was ten years old. Pia is like any other girl in her small hometown until her grandmother explodes in flames at the family's Advent dinner due to granny's overzealous use of hair spray in close proximity to an open flame.  After this happens the story of the ordeal in all its many false incarnations spreads like wildfire all over town and throu...