Chantel's Reviews > House Of Glass

At the end of the day & when all is said & done; I’ve read this story before, split into other books. When I was making my way through this story I was hoping that something would transpire to set it apart from all the others but, nothing ever did & I was left disappointed.
 
I am glad to see a character who has physical impairments navigate their way through the world with a good head on their shoulders, familial support & a decent sense of self. Clara wanted to be a part of the world & worked very hard to realize that. Though she had a condition that made her subject frequently to broken bones, therefore rendering most things impossible, she still pushed herself to make her mark in society & I applaud Fletcher for writing the main character who was eager to surpass whatever (& anything) presented to them.

Unfortunately, in that same breath, Clara was so beyond rude, that I really could not get behind her as a character. Imagine going to someone else’s house (for work, mind you) & spending all your time pestering everyone at the house because you have an over-active curiosity. I felt a lot of second-hand embarrassment because I could not imagine doing everything she did. Read the room for goodness sake; people are uncomfortable talking about the past residents of the house.

I understand that for the purpose of the novel much of the progression in the story comes from Clara being a busy body with no social skills & noting that everyone is a ‘loser’ because they don’t get along with her in the same way that her parents did but, holy cow give it a rest. By page 100 Clara becomes such a rude, self-centred prick I was surprised that I made it that far in the book.
 
Fletcher is a good writer but the way this story was written left a bit to be desired. A lot of the story is fillers; Clara ponders how everyone around her is a simple village person, how her mother has just died, she talks to herself about how she thinks people are acting strangely, etc. I didn’t feel as though the scenes were ever set & but, maybe that was intentional as Clara had little to no experience outside her house in London. However, I found a lot of her dialogue redundant & it was difficult for me to believe that everyone would be so blissfully accommodating to her annoying questioning. I certainly would have told her to eat crow & busy herself with her job.
 
This leads me to Clara’s reason for being at the house; to plant flowers. Maybe I’m missing something but it felt a little contrived to think that someone who could hardly maneuver themselves in an exchange of goods at a store, let alone someone who just learnt about the garden where these plants were coming from (the month before) was suddenly the plant expert & was going to plant (alone) all these flowers in this massive greenhouse.

There was a crew specifically hired to tend to the garden, the lawns, & the landscape as a whole & yet this random girl is hired on with no previous experience to tend to an entire greenhouse on her own? Again, maybe I’m missing something but, along with the fact that Patrick leisurely let her leave the house to go do physical labour, the whole thing felt improbable.
 
While reading this story I couldn’t help but recall a handful of other novels that approached the same topics in a way that left me wanting while reading this one. I think we could have done without the entire Veronique plot because truly, how many times do we have to utilize the abuse of women as plot points; it’s tried.

The story behind Mr. Fox & his random desire to focus energies on the outside of a beautifully decrepit house rather than the inside repairs was interesting enough; we had a lot to go with in terms of exploring the village, the house, even if we held a little ghostly intrigue, a plot point we needed not, the staff, Clara herself (we spent 100 pages on her backstory). We could have even benefitted from a perspective change to that of Charlotte (her mother) to reveal the final twist.

Overall, this book could have been a novella & would have benefitted from a shorter format & possibly a less unnerving main character.