2016 Reading Challenge Review #1: A book I've owned but never read

For my first challenge this year, I went with a book I own but have never read.  It's called Haunting Experiences: Encounters with the Otherworldly and it's by Michelle Belanger.  I know I already wrote a little bit about this book, but now that I've finished it I wanted to give my final thoughts.

I would have liked this book a lot better if Ms. Belanger wasn't so concerned with making sure that the reader believed her.  She admits in the introduction and the conclusion that she has struggled her whole life with the question, What will people think?, so I can see why she would be so self-conscious.  Still, if you're writing a book about this stuff (and this was not her first book about her experiences with the Otherworldly), I feel like you should turn off that inner commentary.  In the conclusion of the book, she says she struggled against "the instinct to place qualifiers at the start of every chapter and to apologize for the extraordinary aspects of [her] claims" (p 250).  Well, she may not have placed qualifiers at the start of every chapter, but in my opinion she placed far too many of them in the middle of chapters instead.

Many of her experiences involved other people.  Many of these people were also psychics, or else they were Wiccas, or else they were simply very open to the Otherworldly.  But some of the people in her stories were devout non-belivers.  And she made a point of telling us this.  In the middle of the spooky action.  It interrupted the story every time.  Something odd is happening, and Michelle's friend turns to her -

And then we get her friend's backstory about how s/he is a devout Catholic and has never, ever believed in ghosts or hauntings.  It's as if Ms. Belanger were saying, "Okay, I know this is hard to believe, but if THIS PERSON knew that something Otherworldly was happening, you'd better believe it wasn't all in my head!"

It actually got pretty frustrating.  Why not place these qualifiers at the beginning or the end of a chapter?  If these were fictional stories, those background details would almost definitely be in the exposition rather than during the climax.  It totally interrupted not only the heat of the moment but the flow of the story.

Still, the stories were pretty interesting.  My favorite story actually made me choke up a little.  This one happened to her mother as a teenager.  Michelle's mother took violin lessons from an elderly man, and sometimes she would sit in the hall for a good 10 minutes of her lesson time just to listen to her teacher play on his own.  One day, after her teacher had been in Europe for some weeks, she sat in the hallway for almost half an hour listening to him play when the owner of the music store saw her.  He informed her that her teacher had passed away shortly after returning from Europe.  The two of them went into the music room to find it empty, save for a package that the teacher had dropped off before passing away - a violin that he'd bought for Michelle's mother.  This story truly spoke to me because of my connection to music.  I never took private lessons, but I played the viola for 11 years starting in the fifth grade.  My dad plays the violin, my sister the cello, and my other sister the violin.  Music has always been a huge part of my life, and Ms. Belanger's description of the violin's sound for those who aren't familiar with it was absolutely beautiful.  The thought of an old violin teacher's spirit playing one last song for his favorite student is not hard for me to believe.

So, anyway, my overall rating of this book is 2.5/5.  It was interesting and overall enjoyable, but the author's obsession with not sounding crazy detracted from many of the stories.  I can understand her concern, but I also wish she'd done a better job at putting a lid on her concern.  After all, most people who read this book are likely to be either firm believers themselves, or willing to suspend their disbelief for the purpose of being entertained.  The latter would have been much easier for me if she were not constantly reminding us that it were true and she were not "a nut" (her own words).  Most books leave me with a certain feeling that I can't quite put into words - slowly closing the back cover, I usually sigh and think about the beauty of the book, re-feeling many of the emotions that I felt throughout.  But when I finished this book, the only feeling I had was, "K."

I'm much looking forward to my next book in the challenge!  I'm reading Not Quite the Classics by Colin Mochrie.  This one has been on my to-read list since the moment it came out, but I haven't been able to find it in any libraries or book stores near me.  My Mom gave me an Amazon gift card for Christmas so I finally decided to order the book!