I’m hoping this will be coherent–I just returned from my book club discussion on this book and I wanted to get this out before I headed to bed.

I’m one of those people who, when I read books or see movies, I’m along for the ride.  I was completely caught off-guard by The Sixth Sense, even though I realize in retrospect that there were clues to the secret from almost the first scene of the movie.  Well, The Thirteenth Tale is like that…only better!

It starts out as a simple plot: Vida Winter, England’s most popular novelist, is dying and she hires Margaret Lea, a biographer, to write her life story.  Yet, as life stories go, Vida’s is wrought with twists and turns, secrets and subterfuges.  And, in hearing her story, Margaret is forced to examine her own story.  I don’t want to give more of a synopsis than that because, frankly, I don’t want to give anything away of the plot. 

The Thirteenth Tale is, in a word, Bronte-esque (which I love, since I’m a Bronte fan!).  While Jane Eyre is a common motif in the story, the feel of the book is much closer to Wuthering Heights.  This book also echos Daphne DuMaurier’s Rebecca in many ways, most notably the feeling that the reader has that there is more to the story than they are reading.

I could write pages more on this but, as I said, you really need to read it for yourself!