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In 1919, a young woman named Kitty Weekes falsifies her credentials to get a job as a nurse at Portis House, a mental hospital for shellshocked WWI veterans. It's extremely remote, there's a never-seen Patient Sixteen lurking somewhere, and the plumbing makes spooky noises. Or is it a ghost...?
I loved this setup. Unfortunately, I did not love the book. Kitty is amazingly unlikable but not, I think, on purpose. She forges her resume because she's fleeing an abusive home situation, but it doesn't occur to her until halfway through the book that getting a job as a nurse of all things could harm or kill her unsuspecting patients. She got the idea because a former housemate was a nurse so it's not like she has no idea of what a nurse does.
She's so desperate for the job that she breaks the law to get it and is absolutely determined to stay no matter what, and she supposedly has a long history of forging her way into jobs and faking her background, but once she gets there, she seems to have no clue as to how to not make herself seem incredibly suspicious. She asks obviously stupid and ignorant questions when she could have stayed quiet or asked subtler ones, she argues with everyone for no reason including with people who can make life very difficult for her, she barges into places she's not allowed to go without even attempting to cover her tracks, and she generally makes herself incredibly conspicuous. In short, she is too stupid to live.
I was most interested in Patient Sixteen, who I was hoping would turn out to be the subject of terrible experiments. (Alas, no.) His actual identity is an interesting idea, but like other elements of the book that sound good but aren't, it's clumsily done and then not much is made of it. He and Kitty proceed to have an amazingly chemistry-less romance.
Spoilers!
Patient Sixteen is a guy names Jack Yates who is a wildly famous WWI hero who's a common man, saved a bunch of lives, won medals, gave inspirational speeches, and has a level of fame and adoration comparable to the Beatles in 1965. This would have worked better if it had been set up earlier that he was a person who existed, and this would have been easy to do because he's incredibly famous, Kitty is a fangirl of his, and she even saw him speak once and was incredibly inspired. But instead the first we hear of him is when Dumbass Kitty lies to one nurse that their superior gave her permission to see him (this clever plan of course gets discovered immediately), goes to his room, and is shocked to recognize him. Then we get a giant infodump about who he is.
He's in a secret room because he has shell shock and the government is keeping that a secret because it would make them look bad if the great hero was known to be in a mental hospital. (He has zero actual symptoms that we ever see.)
The mystery and its solution, again, seem good on paper but are boring in execution. Portis House is haunted by the ghost of a shellshocked soldier who was murdered by his abusive father for being a coward. His sister has been hiding in cellar and grounds for ages, because what this book really needed was yet another element not OTT enough to work as Gothic but implausible enough to raise eyebrows.
Are any of St. James' other books better? I was under the impression she's considered a good writer but this book was unimpressive.
I loved this setup. Unfortunately, I did not love the book. Kitty is amazingly unlikable but not, I think, on purpose. She forges her resume because she's fleeing an abusive home situation, but it doesn't occur to her until halfway through the book that getting a job as a nurse of all things could harm or kill her unsuspecting patients. She got the idea because a former housemate was a nurse so it's not like she has no idea of what a nurse does.
She's so desperate for the job that she breaks the law to get it and is absolutely determined to stay no matter what, and she supposedly has a long history of forging her way into jobs and faking her background, but once she gets there, she seems to have no clue as to how to not make herself seem incredibly suspicious. She asks obviously stupid and ignorant questions when she could have stayed quiet or asked subtler ones, she argues with everyone for no reason including with people who can make life very difficult for her, she barges into places she's not allowed to go without even attempting to cover her tracks, and she generally makes herself incredibly conspicuous. In short, she is too stupid to live.
I was most interested in Patient Sixteen, who I was hoping would turn out to be the subject of terrible experiments. (Alas, no.) His actual identity is an interesting idea, but like other elements of the book that sound good but aren't, it's clumsily done and then not much is made of it. He and Kitty proceed to have an amazingly chemistry-less romance.
Spoilers!
Patient Sixteen is a guy names Jack Yates who is a wildly famous WWI hero who's a common man, saved a bunch of lives, won medals, gave inspirational speeches, and has a level of fame and adoration comparable to the Beatles in 1965. This would have worked better if it had been set up earlier that he was a person who existed, and this would have been easy to do because he's incredibly famous, Kitty is a fangirl of his, and she even saw him speak once and was incredibly inspired. But instead the first we hear of him is when Dumbass Kitty lies to one nurse that their superior gave her permission to see him (this clever plan of course gets discovered immediately), goes to his room, and is shocked to recognize him. Then we get a giant infodump about who he is.
He's in a secret room because he has shell shock and the government is keeping that a secret because it would make them look bad if the great hero was known to be in a mental hospital. (He has zero actual symptoms that we ever see.)
The mystery and its solution, again, seem good on paper but are boring in execution. Portis House is haunted by the ghost of a shellshocked soldier who was murdered by his abusive father for being a coward. His sister has been hiding in cellar and grounds for ages, because what this book really needed was yet another element not OTT enough to work as Gothic but implausible enough to raise eyebrows.
Are any of St. James' other books better? I was under the impression she's considered a good writer but this book was unimpressive.
