A solid mystery with an appealing upstate New York setting. A bit of pagan ritual, some family dynamics and a love triangle (of sorts) add color as a folklore teacher unravels a cold case that leads to more present day murder. ( )

Den här boken känns lite som ett halvdåligt plagiat på The Lake of Dead Languages, om det inte vore för att samma författare skrivit båda böckerna. ( )

This contemporary novel is composed of two narratives: the first-person voice of Meg, a recent widow who lands a teaching job at an elite boarding school; and the discovered diary of Lily, one of the artist founders of the school in the 1920's, whose death has never been fully explained. As Meg reads the diary and interacts with the eccentric faculty of Arcadia, she (very) slowly unravels the secrets of Lily's death and other events in the school's past and present. No arguing that Ms. Goodman's pretty sentences can weave a pretty description. No arguing that she can evoke a mood. But that's all I could find star-worthy in this book, and I personally don't read for setting or mood. I read for characters and plot.

The author's characters consist of cardboard. The voices in dialogue are interchangeable, as are Lily's diary voice and Meg's narrative voice. And speaking of the diary, it is ridiculously detailed given that it's written as a letter of confession to Lily's beloved. The intended reader would already know much of the information. (But Meg doesn't, of course, and Meg is the one who must solve the mystery.)

The author clearly wanted her characters to be more than types, but the "depth" doesn't come across because it is never shown in their actions or words. Instead, we only glimpse the fullness of what Ms. Goodman intended when Meg tells us what to think of a character. For example, Meg's first conversation with Sheriff Reade reads as follows (I'm quoting dialogue only and removing the beats/interior monologue):

Reade: "Stop right there. Don't move another inch."
Meg: "What do you mean? I haven't done anything wrong. Reade, isn't it? You're the town sheriff. I'm the new English teacher."
R: "Yes, I know you are, but I don't think you know where you are. If you'll stand still for a second..." [He holds up his lantern to show her the cliff edge at her back.] "Witte Clove. Two more steps and you would have broken your neck down there."

Sometime after this encounter, Meg describes Reade as "gruff." But a gruff person would see her about to step over the cliff and say, "Stop, cliff behind you!" (Actually, in this situation, I think even a chatterbox would get to the point faster than Sheriff Reade does.) Meg also later mentions that her first few encounters with Reade haven't gone so well. But so far, they've acted like two typical, stressed-out people whose goals didn't quite mesh at the time. Nothing suggests animosity or even serious tension.

This example is illustrative of the entire book. Meg says things about the people around her that don't mesh with what we see. Toward the end of the book, she realizes that her daughter is "struggling" with the loss of her father and that "a great deal of her anger toward [Meg] is displaced anger toward [him]." I had read the entire book without any sense of deep anger from Sally. I'd thought she was just being a normal, stretching-for-independence teenager. And the dialogue throughout is as dense as the example above, even more so when the characters soliloquize on the school's past and their family histories and whatever other information Meg needs at the moment to clue her in to the mystery.

With so much interspersed exposition, the plot's pacing barely rivals an inchworm's; but in terms of believability, it almost worked for me until the last 50 pages or so. Around that point I thought, If one more person goes over that cliff ... and then, in the next chapter, one more person did. And by the time Meg had poured out to Sally all the explanations of who was whose mother and grandmother, I was no longer trying to keep track of the convoluted genealogies; I simply didn't care.

Some reviews suggest that Ms. Goodman's other works are better, but I can't find enough spark in this one to read her again. I never cared about the outcome for Meg or her daughter or anyone else. The romance between Meg and Sheriff Reade was cliched and dull (and I had to laugh when their morning-after conversation consisted of yet more rumination on the school's history). I read to love characters, to worry about them and cheer for them. I was never able to do that in the time I spent at Arcadia Falls. ( )

Arcadia school upstate NY set up early 20th century, late 19th c. — arts + crafts for women
women artists — don't give up all for wife/mother
Art Colonies did exist, Roycraft, Byrd — still on Vt. — differ
self sustaining — wood — shelf, furniture
tiles on fireplaces

Meg Rosenthal is driving toward the next chapter in her life. Winding along a wooded roadway, her car moves through a dense forest setting not unlike one in the bedtime stories Meg used to read to her daughter, Sally. But the girl riding beside Meg is a teenager now, and has exchanged the land of make-believe for an iPod and some personal space. Too much space, it seems, as the chasm between them has grown since the sudden, unexpected death of Meg’s husband.

Goodman never fails to enchant me with her Gothic tales of mythology, mystery, and murder and Arcadia Falls is no exception. In the fairy tale setting of the sleepy town of Arcadia Falls in upstate New York, Meg begins a new position as a professor of folklore, hoping for a new start for herself and her teenage daughter following the unexpected death of her husband. However, not is all as it seems at the boarding school for young artists, particularly when one particularly promising student plummets to her death in the falls on the evening of the First Night festival. Goodman’s writing tantalizes as her story plunges the reader into an eerie world of pagan rituals, dark secrets, and mysterious pasts. ( )