About
Reviews
Search
Submit
Home

Mystery Books for Sale

[ Home ]
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]


  

THE RAISING
by Laura Kasischke
Harper Perennial, March 2011
496 pages
$14.99
ISBN: 0062004786


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

In a novel that is being compared to Donna Tartt's THE SECRET HISTORY, Laura Kasischke brings us another college gothic novel, haunting and compelling. The book opens at the scene of a car accident and quickly shifts to the next school semester at the Midwestern college. Nicole Werner, a beautiful sorority girl, was killed in the previous year's accident. Her boyfriend, Craig Clements-Rabbitts, survived – and is being ostracized by Nicole's sorority, Omega Theta Tau. The novel, very much character-driven, shifts between viewpoints: Craig himself; his roommate, Perry Edwards, who also had a crush on Nicole; Shelly Lockes, a university employee who was the first person at the accident scene and claims that Nicole was not immediately dead (although no one will believe her); and Professor Mira Polson, who teaches the seminar Death, Dying, and the Undead, and decides to use Nicole's case as the focal point of a book on the folklore of death on the American college campus.

Both Craig and Perry, and a few other people on campus, come to believe that Nicole is either not dead or that her ghost is in fact haunting them. There have been other deaths and disappearances on the campus and it doesn't take long for the reader to understand that there must be some connection. Is there indeed a supernatural element at play, or is there something just as sinister, but more human, at work?

Kasischke takes her time unspooling the mystery, yet her writing and pacing keeps the reader riveted. We come to know each character so intimately that we want the mystery solved – not only for the sake of the mystery, but so these characters can get on with their lives. But Kasischke won't let us off so easily – there's more horror and heartbreak ahead before we reach the resolution.

§ Lourdes Venard is a newspaper editor in Long Island, N.Y.

Reviewed by Lourdes Venard, April 2011

[ Top ]


QUICK SEARCH:

 

Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
[ Home ]