What readers think of The Thirteenth Tale, plus links to write your own review.

I don't write a lot of reviews but this book is one I just can't stop thinking about. I listen to a lot of audiobooks because of my long commute and I had a hard time turning it off every day, and when the end was near I didn't want it to be over. Ms. Setterfield's writing is beautiful and the characters are well thought out and detailed. The ending was very satisfying and all the questions were wrapped up nicely. I highly recommend.

It is a book that was well written and very imaginative in its telling, but the beginning of the novel is a bit dry and long-winded in it description.

Ahhh! I do not really know where to begin in reviewing this book because there are so very many great things to be said about it. The first thing that comes to mind, are the many different paths that it takes the reader down. It will keep you guessing for all 708 glorious pages. Just when you think you have something figured out, there comes along another unforeseen twist.

The characters are awesome! Each of them have such depth that they become real and leap from the pages right into your reality. This story is being narrated by a lovely girl named Margaret. Margaret is a bibliophile, a biographer, and in a way she is also a detective. She is writing the life story of the world's most beloved authoress, Ms Winter. Along the way, Margaret gets herself caught in to the mysterious past of Ms Winters. Not only is Margaret writing the biography , but she is also trying to solve the mystery that she has gotten herself mixed up in. All the while she is lost in Ms Winter's story, she is also dealing with her own personal demons.

You will form many, many questions along the way, but not to worry because they will all be answered in the end. Don't you just hate to read a book that leaves you hanging? Well, The Thirteenth Tale will not do that. Every mystery that is uncovered during this story will be answered.

You will not be disappointed with this book! It has something new to discover around every corner!

I bought Diane Setterfield’s bestseller, “The Thirteenth Tale” on impulse, when I saw it lying on a bargain table in the grocery store. I usually avoid bestsellers. Hype steers me away from books more often that it steers me towards them, and I just didn’t think the writing would be the kind of writing I’d like. However, the promise of a “Gothic” tale was encouraging, and I did love the cover art.

In “The Thirteenth Tale,” author Vida Winter has a story to tell, and she chooses the very unlikely person of Margaret Lea to tell it to.

Margaret is a young woman who seems to have no life outside of her room, the six hours she devotes to reading each night, and her work in her father’s antiquarian bookstore. She does write an occasional short biography, but she’s no Kitty Kelly. Margaret’s interest “has always been in writing biographies of the also-rans; people who lived in the shadow of fame in their own lifetime and who, since their deaths, have sunk into profound obscurity.”

Raised primarily by her book loving father rather than by her mother, Margaret, herself becomes so involved in books, letters, diaries, etc. that she won’t read unless she’s sitting down. When she was seven, she tells us she sat on a high wall to read “The Water Babies,” and “was so seduced by the descriptions of the underwater life that I unconsciously relaxed my muscles…plummeted to the ground and knocked myself out. Reading can be dangerous.”

When Margaret receives a letter out of the blue from the reclusive bestselling author, Vida Winter (“fifty-six books in fifty-six years”) asking Margaret to write Vida’s life story, a story she has told to no one, Margaret is beyond surprised. Besides the fact that Margaret lacks the necessary qualifications to write Vida Winter’s life story, Margaret, herself, has never even read one of Vida Winter’s books. (Margaret’s much more attuned to 19th century literature, instead, and especially “Jane Eyre.”) She does remember having once seen a poster of Vida Winter, and Margaret remembers the “extravagant beauty…the eyes…an inhuman green, the green of glass in a church window, or of emeralds or of boiled sweets.” She remembers thinking: this woman “does not have a soul.” (Though Setterfield never gives us even an inkling of why Margaret would feel that way.)

At first, Margaret is determined to refuse the offer to be Vida Winter’s biographer. Vida Winter is simply too famous. After all, twenty-two people more qualified than Margaret have already tried to write Vida Winter’s story and all twenty-two failed, but one night, curious and unable to sleep, she gets up to make a pot of tea, creeps down to her father’s shop and removes his copy of Vida’s debut novel, “Thirteen Tales of Change and Desperation,” a rewriting of beloved children’s fairy tales. She reads voraciously, with gloves on, so the oil from her skin does not tarnish the cover of the book. The thirteenth tale, however, is missing, and as Margaret’s father explains to her the next day, his copy is a rare one, a first edition, published before it was discovered that the capricious Vida had left the closing tale out of the book. Subsequent copies of the book were simply called “Tales of Change and Desperation,” but Vida’s fans have long wondered what the elusive thirteenth tale revolved around.

Now intrigued herself, Margaret makes the trip to Vida’s Yorkshire home. She finds the famous Vida Winter ill and weakening, but ready to tell Margaret the truth after having spun so many fanciful tales to every reporter and biographer who had the courage to set foot on her doorstep, for Vida Winter, you see, found the tales she spun more interesting than the truth.

Now, however, it’s become vitally important to Vida to tell her story – her real story – to someone. For reasons that will remain unclear until near the book’s end, Vida has chosen Margaret for a very special reason.

Vida’s story takes Margaret – and the reader – back to Angelfield. “Angelfield the village. Angelfield the house. And the Angelfield family itself.” We don’t get to know much about the village, but the house is a decrepit Yorkshire manor house, and the family, while possessing money and property, has no aristocratic titles. And for those of you looking for strange and dysfunctional families, look no further. The Angelfields have it all – adultery, incest, inbreeding, abandoned babies, out-of-wedlock births, dark, tortured secrets, mental and physical illness, violence, outright madness, and maybe even a ghost. The only people who live at Angelfield, other than the family are the elderly housekeeper, known as “the Missus” and the level-headed John Digence, better known as “John-the-dig,” the gardener, who comes from a family whose members have tended the Angelfield topiary garden for generations.

Although this is Margaret Lea’s story, Vida Winter comes to dominate the book. It’s obvious that Setterfield wanted to pay homage to the Charlotte Brontë novel, “Jane Eyre,” which plays a large part in “The Thirteenth Tale,” however, paying homage to that novel required Setterfield to concentrate on strong female characters. The men in the story are either mad or, like John-the-dig, relegated to a minor role, and even the females aren’t quite well developed enough. We very rarely get their inner thoughts. Setterfield keeps us at arm’s length, never really letting us get to know them.

Though the elements of “The Thirteenth Tale” recall the best of the classics, and though Setterfield’s a good storyteller, she’s no Brontë, not yet anyway. While she does a good job of dropping clues to the resolution of her story here and there, the plot, once we reach the end, is still filled with several gaping holes. (I don’t mean unanswered questions or things left unresolved; I mean plot holes.) And while there’s nothing really wrong with Setterfield’s prose, it’s often vague and lacks descriptive qualities that would have brought her story to life.

The switches in person from “we” to “I” are handled well, but they’re a plot device that’s very transparent, even to Margaret. The whole thing was technically "okay," but it gave the tale a false quality that it really never overcame. When we finally reach the end, we find part of the story has been built on deception. Some readers are going to love this, while others are going to shake their heads in dismay. It’s impossible to predict how any particular reader will feel.

”The Thirteenth Tale” is definitely a plot driven novel, and I don’t regret the two days I spent reading it. It was comfy, interesting, but in the end, it wasn’t at all memorable. Though Setterfield, as already mentioned, is a good storyteller, her tale felt like so many tales that have been told before, and sadly, told far better. There was no originality, no adventure, no sense of coming upon something new.

I also thought Setterfield tried too hard to give us a happy ending. In fact, she gave us three or four endings, some happy and some not. She obviously didn’t take the good advice of her writing mentors when they said “when you come to the end, stop.” Instead of stopping, Setterfield carried on. And on. And on. And after the denouement, there’s an Epilogue. More story tacked on. I think the book could have been greatly improved if Setterfield had left a little more for her readers to ponder.

In the end, “The Thirteenth Tale” is better than most debut novels, though it’s certainly not anything stellar. It’s a great book to take on a long train ride, a car ride (if you’re a passenger), a long plane trip, or just to whittle away several hours on a cold winter’s day. Though the ending can be guessed, it can’t be guessed early enough to spoil the read. And Setterfield gives us a little bonus in the character of a charming giant with the improbable name of Aurelius.

When you’re struggling for something to read that doesn’t require you to think too much, when you just want a good story that harkens back to the classics, “The Thirteenth Tale” might fill the bill quite nicely.

3/5

I am an avid book reader and this book is by far one of my favorites. I could hardly wait until my day was winding down so I could pick it back up and read until my eyes were heavy! The characters were very well thought out and described so wonderfully that I was easily able to picture them in my head. It has been about 2 months since I read it and have read several more books since then, but this one exceeds them all.

It has been 2 weeks and 2 books later that I cannot quit thinking about this book. It was not just the wonderful story itself but how it was told and presented for readers. I was so disappointed today to find out that the author has not written another book. I hope she does produce something soon. It was a fantastic book. Thank you Ms. Setterfield.

I recommend this to everyone who asks.

Great read...gothic, murder, mystery, twists and turns.

Vida Winters tells a great tale that will keep you interested non-stop. You don't want it to end. Loved the characters.

You will be confused and think you have it figured out and then ah ha....you were wrong.

I loved this book...I would put it in the same category as the classic: Rebecca

This book is a mystery within a mystery. Strange and tragic, yet so compelling, I wanted more. I hope the author will write more!