We Have Always Lived in the Castle

I was pulled in by the clear, direct prose in this book and hooked by the unique characterization of the narrator— a feral, unpredictable and sometimes violent little girl named Merricat. The central mystery is the mass poisoning of the Blackwood family, for which Merricat’s oldest sister was tried and found innocent.

This book is deliciously gothic, and scratched the itch of reading about a spooky old family in a spooky old house. Merricat’s narration reminded me at times of Scout in “To Kill A Mockingbird” — this story has none of the sociopolitical gravity/complexity, but the two are similar in terms of having a distorted and aggrandizing view of the world. I knocked off a star because I found the ending to be anticlimactic; the text seemed more intent on making an artistic statement than achieving a cathartic resolution. However I give the author big points for the story’s brevity; the prose is crystal-clear and stripped down to the bone.

First off this book is very well written and is shown from such a unique perspective, that being through the eyes of a very imaginative, yet “wicked” young girl.

Mary Kate is such an excellent protagonist and vessel for the story Shirley Jackson is telling here, which simply put is the story of what remains of a family trying to survive through persecution and tragedy, but when experienced alongside Mary Kate, it becomes a story about the trauma of childhood and femininity, societal empathy and what that looks like in practice, the horrors of the “other”, and the ghosts we create and hide from ourselves. It’s fantastic, it’s snappy, and I’d recommend it to just about anyone.

Long live Merricat.