Richard Walker has left a hole in the house he used to dominate with his terrible charisma. It's an interesting choice, in a novel of a literal haunting, to create such a stark space around a metaphorical one. And with every room breached, with every box filled, the family reopens the wounds left by this difficult, controlling, narcissistic, deeply loving man. His ex-wife, his two children and his granddaughter have returned after his death to the rural upstate New York mansion to clear it out in preparation for a sale.

I'm a woman trapped on a balcony, watching a passing parade, a blur of noise and motion that eventually turns to a single point on the horizon, a gutter full of trampled and muddy cups, and the sense of wasting an afternoon.Īnd the stories of Alice and Sandra, the house's spectral inhabitants, do not appear at first have much to do with the memories that haunt the living descendants of Richard Walker. The world has nothing to offer me, no single shred of interest. In fiction, ghosts remain because of some entanglement with the living world, something they must do, resolve, or achieve. It's a construct that makes the story feel at times cozy, like we're trailing behind Poirot in a country retreat, and occasionally panicked and claustrophobic. The narration is pleasingly circumscribed by the physical limits of the house: all the action takes place within its rooms. Rooms, bestselling YA author Lauren Oliver's debut for adults, features an old mansion overstuffed with memories and a family failing to avoid them it also features ghosts of the most literal kind, but leaves open the question of who precisely is doing the haunting. The old clothes that she couldn't wear, the rusting BMW in the driveway her father always meant to fix, the peeling wallpaper in the bathroom that no one had ever liked - she was being haunted by a house. Every dusty shoebox or pile of unsorted mail carried the threat of a memory. They left her the wreckage in the shape of a house, so that cleaning and organizing became disinterring and exorcising, and demanded relentless bravery. The basement was an impassible labyrinth the offices were layered with geologic strata that recorded, in yellowed hotel receipts and birthday cards and middle school art projects, the entirety of her life with them - until the receipts became insurance reports and nursing bills and then, as abruptly as a landslide, nothing at all. They had been sick for a long time, and so the accumulation of stuff that generally accompanies any suburban existence was traumatically amplified: the dining room had two sets of furniture, the living room had three. I have a friend whose parents died when she was a teenager, leaving her the house. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Rooms Author Lauren Oliver

Rooms by Lauren Oliver