Rating:

“Keep cursed and carry on.”

Author: Jennifer Thorne

The Pace family is ready for another dysfunctional vacation. Single, carefree, cavorting Anna knows that she will once again be bullied by her entire family throughout the trip, all her past infractions brought to life over the dinner table, the subject of snide jokes and pointed comments. She also knows that she’ll be family translator, the one with the app-based knowledge, putting up with and apologizing for her oblivious, tourist family. Yet, she packs up and goes to the remote Italian villa in the tiny village of Monteperso anyway. Perhaps she is a sadist, going back for more family carnage. Perhaps, under all her supposed darkness, she’s a traditionalist after all, drawn back to the rules despite all her attempts to break free.

Anna’s mother and father are your average, middle-class, white, bickering tourists. They’ve paid for everything, and while they lavish you with wine and loud talk, they’d kind of like you to know just how generous they’ve been. Anna’s sister, Nicole, and her handsome but docile husband, are the planners for the trip. They’ll keep you on schedule and every moment will be packed with frantic activity. They’ll also bring the requisite 2.5 kids and have segmented adult and kid friendly activities. They will be the example of responsible adults, of course. They’ll also be the constant reminder of what Anna could have and should have become. Maybe Anna should seduce the husband?

The brother Benny and Benny’s sort-of-there boyfriend will be peacemakers (at first). Everyone must hate Anna, except these intermediaries, until they too join the anti-Anna camp.

In the meantime, the villa is going to get creepy. Things will go bump in the night. People will have bad dreams. The kids will see stuff. The locals will act suitably weird and make signs of the evil eye. Something is going to shuffle around in the tower room, which is, of course, sinisterly locked off from the rest of the house. Only Anna’s going to have the sense to realize that something serious is going down, and, of course, she’s going to get the blame for it when the Pace family can no longer hide behind denial.

Diavola has such a dynamic write-up, yet the book itself is a real non-starter. These festering family arguments, which take up more of the book than the actual ghost activity, are more low-key bicker-fests than tense dramas. There are few dark secrets here. This is more of a squabbling family who just don’t like each other very much. And honestly, who can blame them. We don’t like any of them either.

Our protagonist, if we can rightly call her that, is not especially empathetic. Ok, her family isn’t all Mr. Rogers sunshine, but they aren’t so bad. So, her parents like to talk about bankrolling the family vacation . . . well, they did . . . and she could have just said “no thank you.” If someone else pays for you to go on an all-expenses paid trip to Italy, you suck it up. I know I would. Then she complains about translating for them, even though she is the only one who knows the language, which she is apparently fluent in thanks to a few weeks on Duolingo. Not to enrage the decidedly passive-aggressive owl (seriously, they show it as a desiccated corpse in the desert if you, like me, leave your lessons too long), but you aren’t getting that good that quickly.  Also, asking someone to translate a few things like “where is the bathroom” is not a big deal. They are family and they bankrolled an entire, expensive trip to a fancy villa, so, shut up Anna, you privileged little brat. And — anyone out there, if you want to send me on an all-expenses paid vacation, I’ll gladly pick up on my waning Duolingo lessons. Just sayin’.

And then, we hear about the (eyeroll) “incident.” On a long-ago family trip, Anna and her sister were out, drunk at a club together. Anna goes off with another girl for a night of crazy sex, tells her blotto sister, and thinks nothing of disappearing on the family. But, unsurprisingly, drunk sister doesn’t remember. The family panics, caring about Anna and thinking that, you know, maybe she’s dead, and calls the police. Now this is a funny story about Anna being irresponsible (because, you know, it is – and she did abandon her own, drunk sister in a bar in a country where they knew no one.) Sorry Anna, but your family trying to make sure that you were safe does not make them the bad guys. Also, Anna, this story makes you look irresponsible and uncaring, not the other way around.

It goes on and on, none of it interesting. The big breakup Anna had with her boyfriend makes her look equally cold and unsympathetic, although depending on your views, you may disagree with me here. But I’m getting bogged down in the weeds, just as the book does. And, as the book finally does, we eventually get a random ghost with very little back story and even less explanation, with fluorescent yellow (described as “piss yellow” hair), a few wacky scenes, and then we’re back in the good old USA, just like that.

Image by Alban_Gogh from Pixabay

After all that build up, all that that “tension” in the form of stupid arguments that make us like this family less and less, and we’re just out of Italy like that? But, of course, the ghost followed Anna home. But Anna’s too busy drinking and ordering takeout and going to work to really do much of anything about it. And so the plot, if you can call it that, lingers like a bad hangover. It’s about as pleasant as one too, except we didn’t get to have the fun that preceded the hangover.

But Anna is “tough,” of course, so we’re going to get a showdown with yee old, poorly explained ghost, who we still don’t really understand. If you’re patient, you can put together a bit of the ghost’s unlikely backstory from slivers of Anna’s fever dreams and what she tells you from the Internet (for real). And Anna, who can learn entire languages from Duolingo with minimal effort, manages to learn an ancient powerful spell in, like, two seconds with a book that the ghost somehow doesn’t notice she has, so all the icky spooky will soon be resolved.

It’s all so thrown together, so tangential and harum-scarum. The ideas were there, in between the tedious scenes of overdone family feuding. But the execution was terrible, and all the characters had the charm and humanity of a leaky faucet. There was just enough to engender the emotion of irritation, but nothing else.

How did this book become so acclaimed? What magic spell is transfixing others? I don’t know, but this one was a big miss for me. Not recommended.

 

– Frances Carden

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Frances Carden
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