Book Review - Ruth Ware's The Turn of the Key
The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware
Published by: Gallery/Scout Press
Publication Date: August 6th, 2019
Format: Hardcover, 352 Pages
Rating: ★★★
To Buy
Rowan is in prison. Yes, she's the nanny who had the worst thing that could possibly happen happen. The police won't listen. No one will listen. Her fate has already been decided due to a few bad decisions on her part. She thinks if she could just get her story completely told to one person that person would understand and help her. Because no one gets what it was like at Heatherbrae House. The lack of sleep, the feeling of going mad, constantly being pushed beyond her limits. She was thrown into the deep end and she sank. She might be a flawed human being, but she is no murderer! It all seemed like a dream until it became a nightmare. The job in the middle of nowhere, the ridiculous salary, the perfectly behaved children, the chance to get away from her current job at Little Nippers, and the house. Oh, Rowan would have given anything to live there and to be a part of that family, and in the end she did. She should have known it was too good to be true. But the impeccable references got her in the door and she did the best job of selling herself she ever had and somehow she achieved the impossible, her dream job. But the interview gave her a glimpse into a nonexistent world. The smart house with it's omniscient technology might sound appealing, but it's just a means of control. Of forcing the modern and the old to coexist in a way they shouldn't. Also the remodeling of the house was just a means to scrub the past away. But that past is buried deep, like the roots of the plants in the poison garden out back. A garden conceived by a man who lost his daughter due to the very poisons he cultivated. Then there's Jack. He's the handy man. And he is very handy. Maybe too handy. He's always there when Rowan needs him but she doesn't question this until it might be too late. She should have questioned everything. She should have done better. She should have come clean sooner. Maybe then things would have turned out differently. Or maybe she was always supposed to be the catalyst for this tragedy, just a ticking time bomb waiting to explode.
I have issues with The Turn of the Screw. Many, many issues. While many people have written copiously on all the plurality of meanings in The Turn of the Screw I could probably write a dissertation on why I hate it. There'd even be footnotes! But I think spending all my time dwelling on something I dislike wouldn't be the most beneficial to my health, though as I've said before, it's easier to write about something you hate than something you love. You can pinpoint with unerring accuracy everything that gets under your skin while that which makes your heart sing is almost impossible to describe. At this point you're wondering, well, then why did she pick up a retelling of The Turn of the Screw if she hates it so much? The answer is simple, I can see that this story has potential written by anyone other than Henry James and therefore I wanted to see where Ruth Ware would take it. The answer is a lot further and more futuristic than Henry James! Aside from the fact that she uses the built in horror tropes of a smart home perfectly, a home I would never live in because even my phone stopped reading my fingerprint, the bones of this version make it the best version of The Turn of the Screw I have yet read. Notice I am not mentioning The Haunting of Bly Manor, because that was watched, and that is now the pinnacle of perfection all retellings of The Turn of the Screw should be aiming for. What this retelling did so well is make us actually care about the characters and the family dynamic. Plus, with double the number of children, it's like Russian roulette, at least one of them is going down, and you can't be sure which one! So not only did I care if these characters lived or died, the fact that they were all in jeopardy made me turn the pages at breakneck speed. I was totally invested in a story that I thought would be just a mild diversion. Because of this I really started to over-analyze everything. There are weird little errors throughout the book. Rowan purposefully picks up an iPad when leaving the kitchen to watch the children but then ends up using her phone instead. The dog beds move from the weird servants pantry to the kitchen. There are all these little things that add up and I wonder, was it purposeful to highlight the fact that Rowan is an unreliable narrator? Or accidental? If accidental, this is the first time a lack in editing has paid off.
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