Overall: A
Ghost Wall is a brief novel about a 17 year-old-girl named Sylvie whose father has arranged for them and her mother to join an anthropology professor and his students on a trip to the woods of Northumberland, attempting to recreate the Iron Age. It is a tense, atmospheric work, that works a lot in to only a hundred and thirty pages. The threat of her father's abuse hangs over Sylvie, and an indictment of patriarchy is one of the most obvious threads of the book: the two grown men in particular often filling the time with their "projects" while the women are expected to keep the group fed, exactly on time, with no clocks and using historical methods. But there are hints of white nationalism and other incarnations of oppression dropped as well- Sylvie is short for Sulevia because her father wanted her to have a "pure British name." As the story unfolded, I found the Stanford Prison Experiment coming to mind, if not for Sylvie's father who appears to have been your basic tyrant all along, then for the professor and the male students who adapt all to easily to the brutal lives they imagine they are recreating. All in all, it's a simple work but a haunting one, with an impact far beyond its page count.
Overall: A
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AuthorJust another nerdy librarian Archives
December 2023
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