Book Review: The God of Endings, Jacqueline Holland
Fantasy: The God of Endings, Jacqueline Holland
This novel is not just one of the best debut novels I have read this year. It may be the best novel I have read this year.
Collette LeSange is an artist living in upstate New York in 1984. Art, to her, is not just the creation of paintings or drawings. To her, it is a way of creating well-rounded children. She has created a preschool that caters to the children of the wealthy, teaching them art and French in preparation for admission to Harvard–or at least first grade.
Anna was a young girl living with her father and brother in the northeast United States during the early 1800s. Her father carved gravestones, striving to create beauty amidst the sorrow of death. When a plague afflicts her town and her father and brother die, Anna is sent to live with her grandfather in New York. However, the plague has followed her, and she is soon near death herself.
When writing to Anna’s grandfather, asking him to care for his children, her father was not aware that the man he was asking for help was not just a man. He was immortal, lived solely on blood, and had extraordinary strength, speed, and senses. Although he would eschew the word, he was a vampire. Rather than let his granddaughter succumb to her illness, he turned Anna into a vampire as well.
It’s not much of a spoiler to reveal that Anna and Collette are the same person. The book shifts between the past, revealing how Anna became Collette, how she came to deal (badly) with what she had become, how she lived and traveled and discovered both her love and talent for art and her skill at teaching children. The other chapters look at Collette’s life in 1984, the effect that an artistically gifted student has on her…and the transformation her body is making to becoming something she no longer recognizes. Her body is craving more and more blood, much more than she has ever needed or wanted before, and as much as she adores the children in her care, the fact that they are walking bags of blood delivered daily to her house is becoming more and more difficult to ignore.
Jacqueline Holland is a wonderfully gifted storyteller. The plot is deep and profound. The prose is beautiful. The characters are compelling. I am not usually a fan of vampire stories (particularly vampires that sparkle), but Collette’s story and dilemma are not only engaging. They are absolutely gripping. Filled with moral dilemmas, deep questions, unexpected turns, and a critically damaged protagonist who dreads her own needs, The God of Endings is far from a typical horror story. It is a story of gain and loss, of family and betrayal, of unanswerable questions and of questionable answers. In short, it is one of the best books I have read this year.
Book Review: The God of Endings, Jacqueline Holland