Title: The Keeper of the Key
Author: Nicole Willson
Publisher: Parliament House Press
Pages: 286
My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
Heed the Dead or Join Them, said the
warning on the cover, and I braced myself for a good read.
When 16-year-old Rachel Morley’s mother,
Tara, decides to accept boyfriend Geoff’s invitation to move into his mansion,
Morgan House, in St Mary’s, Rachel feels uprooted. When they get to Morgan
House, Rachel gets the creeps. She can’t help feeling that someone is watching
her. Soon strange things begin to happen. She feels a strange presence in
the house and hears odd noises.
Her mother, eager to build a future with
Geoff, hopes Rachel will settle. But that won’t be easy as Geoff has lots of
rules, the strangest of which is that Rachel is never to go into the basement.
Luckily what makes her new town bearable
is the presence of Nick Alexander, a good-looking guy who takes Rachel to the
cemetery on their first date. Suddenly, the town of St Mary doesn’t feel so
unbearable. The only trouble is that Morgan House seems more dangerous than
ever. Each night she has horrible dreams about something evil in the basement,
and a strangely familiar man whose face she can’t see, then wakes up to find
herself in the basement, even though she doesn’t remember having gone there.
The book is written in the 1st person
present tense PoV of Rachel. The author creates a sense of dread. The eerie
atmosphere weighs us down. The writing evokes the right imagery. The pace is
good. Even though I guessed the source of the mystery, I still continued
reading.
Geoff is a pain from the beginning, at
least to Rachel. But he comes across as one-dimensional. Initially, there is
nothing to redeem him in Rachel’s eyes.
The mother’s character could have been a
little stronger. She doesn’t seem to have any agency of her own. She tells
Rachel to give Morgan House a shot, and that if she doesn’t like it, they will
leave. But then when Rachel expresses her misgivings, she still won’t move.
Another time, she tells Rachel that if
she is not happy with Geoff’s proposal, she will decline. But then, she accepts
the proposal. In both instances, Rachel settles down and makes peace with her
decision. Which is a letdown, given her fierce desire to leave.
They don’t decide to leave until the
very end. They should have at least made an attempt to leave.
Overall, I felt that there should have
been more scenes with Rachel and her mother together, without Geoff around. We
don’t get to see the mother-daughter dynamic enough. Also, Rachel mentions her
father initially, but then halfway through the book, she comes to know
something about her dad that she hadn’t known and that detail seemed forced.
Having come to know of that fact, Rachel stops stressing over it, and doesn’t
mention it again. This is strange, given that relationships play a huge part in
this book.
There were some things that weren’t
clear.
Why was Rachel targeted? Just because
she lived in the house?
What was the deal about the key in the
title? Why does that key show up so late?
Rachel talks about another kind of
ghost, when friendships fizzle out. I found this very sad. She knows that best
friend, Elena, will soon forget her. On the other hand, Rachel herself forgets
about Elena, once she meets Nick.
(I read this book on NetGalley. Thank you to the author, the publisher and NetGalley.)
