[The Vanishing of Katharina Linden] E–pub Ë Helen Grant

• Paperback
• 343
• The Vanishing of Katharina Linden
• Helen Grant
• English
• 04 March 2019
• 9780141325736

Helen Grant ↠ 2 Read

The Vanishing of Katharina Linden Download × 2 Guardian'A strange haunting modern fairy tale' John Connolly author of The Book of Lost ThingsThe setting of the small German town of Bad Münstereifel in Helen Grant's debut novel The Vanishing of Katharina Linden is based on her own experience of emigrating there from England as a child Her other darkly thrilling young adult novels The Glass Demon and Wish Me Dead are also available from Penguin. Pia Kolvenbach is known as the girl whose grandmother s head exploded in a freak accident at the Advent Dinner table Advent Candle met Aua Net hairspraythe rest was history with which Pia has to live every day When young girls start to disappear Pia and her trusty sidekick StinkStefan are on the case Two pariahs and the avuncular storyteller Herr Schiller explore the history of their village Bad Munstereifel through folk tales and gossip Eventually the dark side of the town begins to show itself and Pia begins to learn the hard lesson that people are not always what they seem to beI thought this was a novel of manners customs and small town life not unlike The Little Friend by Donna Tartt The ThrillerMystery angle took a back seat to the Town itselfThe missingvanished girls were a vital part of the story but so as a part of Pia s coming of age The pacing of the story was slow until the last 13 of the book The ending seemed a bit rushed to me but in hindsight i think it was right since the leisurely pace of the first 23 was good preparation for an ending that wasn t lurid yet still kept the pages turningPia Kolvenbach was not a precocious child by any means She was witty a bit of a smart aleck but all told she was just a kidtrying to deal with a situation where even the adults seemed to be at a loss Curious selfish petulant and persistant she carried this tale on noble 10 year old shoulders and lived to tell it years laterI enjoyed the book and gave it the rating I did for being both a coming of age storyand a mystery about Life itself as we grow into it RecommendedThis is a review of an ARC3 Stars Chinese Cinderella III based on her own experience of emigrating there from England as a child Her other darkly thrilling young adult novels The Glass Demon and Wish Me Dead are also available from Penguin. Pia Kolvenbach is known as the girl whose grandmother s head exploded in a freak accident at the Advent Dinner table Advent Candle met Aua Net hairspraythe rest was history with which Pia has to live every day When young girls start to disappear Pia and her trusty sidekick StinkStefan are on the case Two pariahs and the avuncular storyteller Herr Schiller explore the history of their village Bad Munstereifel through folk tales and gossip Eventually the dark side of the town Shadowed Stranger begins to show itself and Pia From Sinner to Saint begins to learn the hard lesson that people are not always what they seem to The Murders in the Rue Morgue beI thought this was a novel of manners customs and small town life not unlike The Little Friend His Mistletoe Bride by Donna Tartt The ThrillerMystery angle took a Octopussy and The Living Daylights back seat to the Town itselfThe missingvanished girls were a vital part of the story Octopussy and The Living Daylights but so as a part of Pia s coming of age The pacing of the story was slow until the last 13 of the Octopussy book The ending seemed a Fifth Avenue Uptown Tale Blazers bit rushed to me Power Engineering but in hindsight i think it was right since the leisurely pace of the first 23 was good preparation for an ending that wasn t lurid yet still kept the pages turningPia Kolvenbach was not a precocious child The Outlander Series OutlanderDragonfly in AmberVoyagerDrums of AutumnThe Fiery CrossA Breath of Snow and AshesAn Echo in the Bone by any means She was witty a ФМ bit of a smart aleck 世界の終りとハードボイルド・ワンダーランド Sekai no owari to hādoboirudo wandārando but all told she was just a kidtrying to deal with a situation where even the adults seemed to Crome Yellow be at a loss Curious selfish petulant and persistant she carried this tale on noble 10 year old shoulders and lived to tell it years laterI enjoyed the The Story Within book and gave it the rating I did for Küsse niemals einen Filmstar Liebe nach Drehschluss 2 being Bloody Bones both a coming of age storyand a mystery about Life itself as we grow into it RecommendedThis is a review of an ARC3 Stars

The Vanishing of Katharina Linden Download × 2 Shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal Helen Grant's first teen novel The Vanishing of Katharina Linden follows a misfit teenager as she attempts to unravel the mystery of several strange disappearances in the small town of Bad Münstereifel The Vanishing of Katharina Linden bridges the world of the traditional Grimm fairytale with the darker world of Angela Carter's adult fairytalesOn the day Kathari. With all the hype surrounding the US publication of The Vanishing of Katharina Linden I was eagerly anticipating Helen Grant s debut Sadly the marketing copywriters are doing better work than the actual author and once halfway through the book I found myself impatiently waiting for the completion of a book that was decently written but poorly conceived The publisher would do well to stop likening it to other works because not a single comparison pans out particularly the idea that the narrator here Pia Kolvenbach bears any resemblance whatsoever to the intelligent and delightful Flavia de Luce the creation of Alan Bradley If anything comes close it s the reference to the book having the air of the Grimm Brothers fairy tales but the real fairy tales that are frightening and twisted not the Disney fied versions thank goodness and yet one wishes that the real plotline had enjoyed some of the imagination that the stories suggest rather than simply lacing Pia s perspective with the stories so that she might half wonder if fantastic things really are coming to pass In short everything that I read about the novel beforehand led me to expect something uite different and probably soured my reading experience as a result I found myself a bit annoyed in the beginning because of all this then was pleasantly disposed as I focused on the story but uickly grew annoyed again when the mystery worked itself out to be disappointingly predictable Grant s writing style is acceptable if not particularly noteworthy but had it not been for the author stumbling onto the legends of this particular German town and retelling them here I would have found the whole thing very dull indeed The Vanishing of Katharina Linden is set in the late 1990s and I started the novel feeling surprised as nothing I had read seemed to hint at the modern time period Also surprising was the fact that since the author s European location is hyped I expected a translated work and was a bit thrown by the ridiculous abundance of German words purposely inserted into the English text I feared that this would be the only consistent way to tell that the story was set in Germany and not simply any old European town with a history rich in folklore but there are enough subtle differences of to make this somewhat unfounded and of course there s the occasional awkward reference to Nazis and the war There s a glossary in the back of the book but it s rather unnecessary once one accepts the presence of the liberal scattering of German words Needless to say the author is English and simply moved to the Continent with her family and actually lived in the town where the book is set as a matter of fact but I can t see any townspeople thanking her for putting their location on the map if it s to do with the abduction of little girls Bad M nstereifel is a small German hamlet filled with people who like to gossip and since everyone knows everyone and often knows everything about them for several generations back few things are ever forgotten What our ten year old narrator Pia Kolvenbach would like everyone to forget is the unfortunate incident of her grandmother s demise which involved an Advent wreath a match and an abundance of hairspray As a result Pia is the girl whose grandmother exploded and even if it isn t true she technically died from a heart attack as a result of the surprise of going up in flames at the dining table it s the thing Pia will be known as to the rest of the town s inhabitants particularly the nasty school children After this Pia can only claim to have one friend the class pariah known as StinkStefan and even having this one friend is enough to make Pia depressed if she s sunk so low as to need Stefan s companionship Thankfully Stefan s unfortunate moniker is a result of his tendency to linger like a bad smell rather than from any odor emanating from his personage Pia herself is the daughter of a German man and an English woman a first of two progeny from very tense marriage that is clearly heading for divorce from the get go Side note they re also terrible parents Pia s little brother is a baby and given little attention from the narrator Neither parent seems to make any attempt to connect with their first born and the entirety of their parental concern is expressed in forbidding Pia to go places so she can be safe in the houseWell if gossip is what the town wants then that s certainly what it gets Katharina Linden a little girl nearly the same age as Pia disappears in the middle of a town holiday celebration where children dressed in costume The little girl dressed as Snow White simply vanished without a trace and the town can find no sign of her Immediately the other children in town feel the repercussions as parents go into overdrive to keep their children indoors and away from whoever or whatever snatched up Katharina Linden Pia and Stefan are about as interested as anyone in the missing girl and mention as much to their elderly friend Herr Schiller a kindly grandfather figure who Pia used to visit with her grandmother and now continues to visit on her own and with Stefan The allure of Herr Schiller rests in the fact that he treats children like intelligent beings and has a never ending supply of stories derived from the fantastic folklore of the area Unfortunately Herr Schiller only seems tired when they try to discuss Katharina s disappearance and then the children learn that this is due to the fact that Herr Schiller once had a daughter named Gertrud who disappeared years ago in another instance where young girls went missing The town is inclined to point its finger towards local recluse Herr D ster Herr Schiller s estranged brother Frau Kessel one of the old women in the town with a reputation for knowing everything tells Pia and Stefan that in their youth both brothers fought over the same woman and Herr Schiller won only to have her die of illness during the war and then have his daughter stolen and murdered by a jealous brother Of course this is just her suspicion but in a town where gossip is enough to condemn you it was only the fact that Herr Schiller did not give credit to this theory that kept Herr D ster from real blame Three girls went missing then and girls will go missing in the present time before Pia and Stefan ultimately play a role in solving the mystery At least the author is not unaware of the danger facing young children as they attempt to solve a crime and adults aren t always as inept as they can sometimes be depicted Herr Schiller continues to scare the daylights out of Pia and Stefan with his wonderful stories which are indeed uite interesting and the kids try to survive school and their home lives turning to the mystery as a thing that they can work on together At one point in the novel Pia is sent off to spend part of the summer with her grandmother in England enduring cruel cousins and intense boredom before she starts realizing that perhaps this trip wasn t just to keep her safe from whatever is snatching children in her hometown but perhaps the move might be permanent as her parents continue to feud Ultimately while I was disappointed with the novel as a whole there were elements of Grant s writing that I enjoyed and I hope will serve as the cornerstones of her future work so she might improve though if she continues to write books with this mystery edge to them I m not sure I ll bother much as the uestion of who or what kidnapped the little girls was easy for the reader to decipher from the beginning I also like the fact that the story is essentially told by Pia looking back on this time of her life with a few years worth of distance so that occasionally she might note things she hadn t realized at the time mostly dealing with the motivations of adults that don t make sense to children Of course what I particularly liked about this was the fact that adult Pia didn t feel the need to necessarily spell these things out In all I wasn t delighted with The Vanishing of Katharina Linden but I did see some promise in Helen Grant that I hope stretches beyond the creativity of the folklore that was the truly delightful part of this novel to carry her through the next few novels that Delacorte eagerly snapped up according to the ARC

Review The Vanishing of Katharina Linden

The Vanishing of Katharina Linden Download × 2 Na Linden disappears Pia is the last person to see her Terror is spreading through the town How could a ten year old girl vanish in a place where everybody knows everybody elsePia is determined to find out what happened to KatharinaBut then the next girl disappears'For something so chilling it is terrific entertainment' Sunday Times'Grant's splendid debutis a feast of treats and creeps Wonderful'. I was lucky enough to read an advanced copy of Grant s novel and it still haunts me Wonderful creepy atmospheric mystery that would fit perfectly in the darkest collection of Grimms folktales