Arrowood by Laura McHugh

  

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Category: Adult
Genre:  Mystery, Suspense, Gothic
Content: Nothing I can remember

 

Arrowood is the most ornate and grand of the historical houses that line the Mississippi River in southern Iowa. But the house has a mystery it has never revealed: It's where Arden Arrowood's younger twin sisters vanished on her watch twenty years ago--never to be seen again. After the twins' disappearance, Arden's parents divorced and the Arrowoods left the big house that had been in their family for generations. And Arden's own life has fallen apart: She can't finish her master's thesis, and a misguided love affair has ended badly. She has held on to the hope that her sisters are still alive, and it seems she can't move forward until she finds them. When her father dies and she inherits Arrowood, Arden returns to her childhood home determined to discover what really happened to her sisters that traumatic summer.

Arden's return to the town of Keokuk--and the now infamous house that bears her name--is greeted with curiosity. But she is welcomed back by her old neighbor and first love, Ben Ferris, whose family, she slowly learns, knows more about the Arrowoods' secrets and their small, closed community than she ever realized. With the help of a young amateur investigator, Arden tracks down the man who was the prime suspect in the kidnapping. But the house and the surrounding town hold their secrets close--and the truth, when Arden finds it, is more devastating than she ever could have imagined.

Arrowood is a powerful and resonant novel that examines the ways in which our lives are shaped by memory. As with her award-winning debut novel, The Weight of Blood, Laura McHugh has written a thrilling novel in which nothing is as it seems, and in which our longing for the past can take hold of the present in insidious and haunting ways.

 

I really enjoyed reading this book. It was atmospheric and I really felt like I could picture the location. There were no big surprises for me, as I found it fairly easy to figure out where the twins were, but I still found this to be an enjoyable story. More than anything it got me interested in looking up the location of the house in the book. There was an address for the house in the book and I ended up looking it up to see if the house really existed. There was no house at the exact address. The town is real, the street along the Mississippi river is real and there are lots of historic homes on that street. I did find the house in the book that was referred to as the Green house, and said to have a stone arch in the front that resembles teeth. I was surprised to find that was a real place, and it was built by Hugh W. Green in 1912. It's an odd looking house for sure.

There's one small issue I had with the book that I have to mention. There's a part in the book where the main character talks about her mother longing to live in a more modern house (this would have been in the late 70s or early 80s when her mother lived in the old Victorian home) and she longed for wood paneled walls and popcorn ceilings. I'm sorry, but NO ONE longs for popcorn ceilings, absolutely no one. I can believe the wood paneled walls and even shag carpeting, but not pop corn ceilings! All jesting aside though, I did really like this book and I may even read something else by this author in the future.