Twitter, Facebook et al are reputedly eroding our attention span. We lack the ability to stick with a big book as it trundles across its landscape. Will this affect sales of Riordan's 500-page second novel?
No way: after all, she's not an author; she's already a phenomenon.
You've read Jane
Eyre? Then you know most of this plot already. Sombre, handsome
widower; matching house; gutsy young governess; ominous footsteps in the attic: they're all here. See it as homage rather than plagiarism.
Two lives thread through the book: Harriet Jenner, who works at irritatingly-spelled
Fenix House in the 1870s, and her granddaughter Grace, who has grown up hooked on Fenix narratives. Unexpectedly, but with a touch of predestination, she ends up there too. Alas, her images of "umber and Wedgewood blue ... curving banister ... Turkish rugs in rose and gold" are rudely dispelled.
The gates are rusty, the azaleas dead in the middle (cue sinister sound-track), the housekeeper smells and there's a significant gouge in the wallpaper.
