Ghostwalk by Rebecca Stott

I borrowed Ghostwalk by Rebecca Stott from my mom. She said she liked it. We don't always have the same taste, but I thought it would be a fun, light read, which is what I needed right now. However, I really hated this book.

There is no real way for me to summarize the plot of this book without really giving a lot away, but I will try. The book is narrated by Lydia Brooke, who is a writer. Cameron is her former (married) lover, and his mother, Elizabeth, has just drowned mysteriously. Elizabeth was in the midst of writing a biography of Isaac Newton that described his work in alchemy. Cameron asks Lydia to come in and ghostwrite the rest of the book that his mother hadn't finished. Meanwhile, Cameron is a neuroscientist who is being targeted by an animal rights group because he does research on animals. That's the basic premise of the book. What follows is my opinion of the book, and it will contain spoilers that I will try to keep to a minimum.

So many things in this book really bugged me. First of all, the entire book is narrated by Lydia to Cameron. She is basically explaining to him what has happened to her. However, Cameron would have already known most of it, and at the end of the book, Lydia hates Cameron (I think), so why would she want to tell him this. Secondly, Lydia believes things, shocking things, about people she loves after being told them only once. She blindly accepts these things as fact with no evidence to back it up. Also, Cameron is being targeted by animal rights groups because he does research on animals but then it is revealed that he's also being targeted because an antipsychotic drug he created is being developed into a chemical weapon. But then it's revealed that he's really the one targeting himself just to make the animal rights groups look bad. And if that made no sense, then you get the feel of the book. The book that Elizabeth was writing proves to be controversial in that it reveals certain things Newton did to get ahead. These revelations are the reasons why she died and she chose Lydia to ghostwrite the book because she knew that she would be true to what Elizabeth wanted to say. But then Lydia cuts that part out of the book, because she was threatened by a ghost but then the ghost follows through on the threat anyway.

This book reminded me a lot of the Da Vinci Code, in that something is always happening, but the whole of the book doesn't really amount to anything. The plot of this book was all over the place. The feeling I'm left with is that the author of the book changed her mind about what was going to happen several times, but never went back and changed what happened previously in order to agree with this. So, there was no real cohesive story in this book.