The Wish House review

"The Wish House" is your typical coming of age story that you see every where in teen fiction and so of course the author had to attempt to make it a bit different. Celia's writing style and her tendency to write in the past usually appeal to me very much. This book I found was different. It is about a 14 year-old boy who goes "caravan-ing" with his family every summer holiday to the same caravan site.
This year is different his childhood friend Dylan has grown up and left school to work on his families farm and he no longer has time to play with Richard. So Richard must make his own fun. He ends up going to visit the "Wish House" which is an old farm house that the boys believe to be abandoned. There he bumps into Lucia laying naked in the grass. Being the adolescent that he is, his reaction is predictable. He thinks she is beautiful and just stares. From here things just get more interesting, he meets Clio, Lucia's daughter and her painter father who takes an interest to him as soon as he sees him.
The story was well written, but a little boring in some parts. The characters that were living in the wish house were vaguely developed, this was as probably intentional by the author to create the idea that the boy is remembering all of this, but it just makes the characters seem far away and hard to understand at times. There are a few things that in the story that don't really add up, and make the plot seem unbelievable. The ending was good, but rather disappointing and didn't really make sense. Some of the plot ideas were meant to surprise you, like they did to Richard, but they really just didn't make any sense at all.
The story was confusing at times and even dull. Not to say that I didn't really enjoy some parts, there were parts of it that were beautifully written, like the scene in the woods when Richard finds Clio in his "secret" clearing and they become friends, then quickly afterwards, lovers. Another fact that bothered me about the story is the fact that Richard talked about his parents as if they were conservative, loving and concerned about his well fare, yet throughout the story they never seemed to catch on that he was running around with a bunch of hippies, it was always made clear that they thought that he was with Dylan. Maybe that is only because that is what Richard thought they believed, but it still isn't portrayed very well. You would also think that if they knew he was spending all his free time with a girl his own age and they were mostly alone that they would be concerned, but both parents seemed to be indifferent to this, despite what the main character believed about them.
The mentions of pagan ideas, witch craft and myths are very common themes in Celia Rees's novels, she enjoy creating strong female characters, and though Clio and Lucia were interesting and well written they still had a vagueness about them, that made them hard to get close to as if they were just a figment of his imagination. Even later when he sees Clio in the "present" she still seems unreal and distant, this is probably done to show how far away from him she always was, but I just find it hard to understand, it would have made more sense for the author to make Clio closer and more human at the end of the novel to show you that she was, in fact, real.
The whole book focus on painting and paintings. At the beginning of each chapter a different piece of the artists work is described in the style of a review or of a blur that one would see in a gallery. This adds interest, sure, but it was really left unexplained. It was probably just to remind you that the whole book is based on Richards memories of that summer, but it was done in such a way that it wasn't always clear on what the author was trying to say. The paintings that were described were the ones that Richard is presumably looking at at the gallery. The whole thing with the family being pagans and Jay's (the artist) paintings focusing on myths just distances the family further from Richard, which seems to be the idea of it all.
In all I enjoyed the story in this book, but the ending was sloppy and most the characters vaguely done to the point that they were almost uninteresting. If you think you would enjoy despite these facts, I would recommend it, but otherwise don't bother with it.

Its been to long...

I obviously suck. I have not posted anything on here in awhile and I most definitely haven't written any book reviews :S...
So instead of writing a long-winded and pointless review of Looking for Alaska I am going to write a quick and to the point review of The Wish House by Celia Rees.