Bücher mit dem Tag "tragedy"

Once upon a time, we´ve read it all: The Tale of two stepsiblings falling in love and struggling with the meaning that implies. This story is the same, except not. Cooper´s and Jace´s life are thrown together when their parents open up about their relationship to Cooper and his sister. First, there is only jealousy, maybe even hate. But that becomes so much more. 

While finding the meaning of their lives, the boys also find each other and form an incredible friendship. Than, Cooper is outed and not much later, Jace goes to university in an attempt to get away. 
There is very much heartbreak included here, but it is great and the ending is happy, so I am happy, too. 

To begin with, I didn’t know what the story was about before I read it. I had seen Thornhill in bookshops and libraries for a past two years and it immediately struck me as a unique book, one that I would enjoy and eventually come back to, unless so many other books I find interesting but never think about again. Finally, I picked up a copy at my local library last week and, of course, it was the first book out of the handful I picked as my post-thesis and getting-back-to-reading-after-finishing-a-degree book. Hence, for a little while, I had completely overlooked the fact that the story was about two girls from different times, although that’s not really a spoiler because it is very obviously indicated in the dates. Once I had figured out the basic outline of the plot, however, it all became a little bit less mysterious and rather straight-forward.

I was constantly waiting for a big revelation, for a plot twist, for something unexpected to happen, yet I was disappointed in this regard. The one person I was most interested in was she, her, the girl Mary doesn’t name but who bullies her and makes her life in the orphanage, Thornhill, a living nightmare – quite literally, shecontinuously creeps up to Mary’s room at night, knowing on her door or leaving encrypted messages. From the beginning, it is clear that the relationship between her and Mary is tense, full of hatred, fear, and dislike. I was expecting a specific reason to lie at the bottom of this relation, a reason than the obvious one of the bully as I felt Mary had hinted at it throughout the novel. It was maybe the biggest disappointment for me that the hinted at circumstance was not revealed – if it even existed. The quasi-explanation given during the novel could not satisfy me and I still thought there was more to it.

Anyway, the strong suit of the novel is not the story, I contend, but the interplay of the visual and verbal text. It’s a graphic novel after all. I enjoyed the restriction of Ella’s story to the wordless visual text and that of Mary to the written text and it worked really well. I was a good decision to have Ella’s story, in 2016, be told through visuals and Mary’s through words. On the one hand, Ella’s story is seemingly told in present-tense, something we witness as it occurs, following her out of her house into the gardens of Thornhill and inside the old building, in the search of a new friend. Mary’s story, on the other hand, we are told about in retrospect. We can’t experience it as it happens, but we can read about it. Moreover, living in a word that relies more and more on visuals instead of text, having the contemporary storyline told in images is even more powerful. Where the two storylines significantly overlap, newspaper articles come into play, cleverly interweaving visuals and written words and form one unifying narrative of words and images, of black (the colour dominating in Ella’s narrative) and white (dominating in Mary’s as the background of the page).  I could certainly go back and find something new, especially in the illustrations, in a future reading.

It was a nice surprise to find out that author Pam Smy actually graduated from Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, still teaching and living here, as it is the town I myself live and study in at the moment. She got inspiration from a local school I drive by occasionally and I am glad I put off reading Thornhill until I was here in Cambridge myself.

Although I expected a bit more of the story, I enjoyed the concept of Thornhill and will keep a lookout for further work of Sym’s.