Looking Glass Sound by Catriona Ward
After reading Joel from I Would Rather Be Reading’s review of Looking Glass Sound by Catriona Ward, I bumped a few other books from my list and raced down to my local library to borrow this book.
The structure of the story is fascinating, with stories inside stories, and inside stories again and if that sounds confusing, it was. I had to concentrate to keep up.
The story began straight-forwardly, with Wilder Harlow’s memoir of himself as a socially awkward and bullied teenage boy visiting a cottage that his parents had inherited in Whistler Bay. Wilder’s memoir was called The Dagger-Man of Whistler Bay, which entwined the story of Wilder’s summer with chilling details of a mysterious serial killer who had recently been breaking into local houses to take photos of sleeping children with a dagger beside them.
Wilder had left New York that summer hoping to fall in love for the first time and to make friends. On his first day in Whistler Bay he met Nat, a local fisherman’s son and Harper, a troubled British girl. The trio became firm friends, although Wilder and Nat were in competition for Harper romantically. The friendship ended after the trio visited a cave hidden in the cliffs where they discovered bodies in barrels, which led to the serial killer’s identity being exposed.
The next section of the story began with Wilder’s first day of college. He was still socially awkward, and was also suffering from nightmares and panic attacks after the traumatic events at Whistler Bay. Wilder was surprised when Sky, a fellow student, befriended him. Sky wanted to be a writer, however his motives were shown to be less kind when it transpired that Sky stole Wilder’s memoirs in order to write his own book about the events in Whistler’s Bay called The Sound and the Dagger.
The next sections of the story were fictionalised versions of events and this is where I really had to start concentrating, trying to work out who was real and who had been made up, and which, if any versions of the story were true.
I liked the sense of place in this story. Whistler Bay sounded exactly like the sort of place I would love, with the wind whistling spookily across the rocks on the beach during certain weather, hidden caves in the cliffs and sparkling, cold blue seas. I liked the characters and felt uneasy and anxious on their behalf as the story developed. I liked being surprised and the feeling of the rug being pulled away from underneath me when what I thought to be true turned out to be more complicated than that.
Joel recommended beginning with other stories by this author before reading Looking Glass Sound, but none of those were available to me. I will seek these books out in future though.
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