The Boatman

The boatman, our imaginary antagonist who haunts our protagonist’s dreams, should have sailed away from this unfortunate shipwreck. The Boatman finds Isabel in an awkward phase of her life: she sees and talks to dead people, rescues a talking ventriloquist dummy for a ghost, and befriends a gallant talking spider, but she still cannot talk to kids her own age. Worse yet, she feels guilty for her birth causing her mother’s death. The boatman, as a personification of guilt, lures vulnerable children into his swampy lair to consume their soul. The question remains: will Izzy be able to escape?

The narrative fails to establish any real stakes in the beginning, instead opting for quick vignettes that sink rather than float. For its intended children and tween audience, there are a couple of compelling narrative ploys and twists, such as the compelling illustrations evoking more inspired narratives such as A Series of Unfortunate Events and Coraline. However, this tale feels like a horror house of mirrors with quick, empty thrills that obscure the reader’s comprehension with unearned profundity. There are some interesting ideas about reconciling with guilt and facing the challenges of a young woman growing up in an era that straddles strict Victorian morality and the New Woman ideal, yet the narrative never explores any of these compelling themes with any meaningful detail and instead moves quickly to the next jump scare. Hawthorne has threaded a narrative cobweb that is more translucent than the ghost and phantoms that haunt her world.

Chapters open with flaring Victorian font that amateurishly obscures other words below, characters uncannily go in and out of genteel accents, and the narrative tries to form a Gothic atmosphere with derivative and tired results. The embarrassingly spelling and punctuation mistakes – the novel’s real horror – littering the text confirm my uneasy feelings about the rushed quality of this book. The opening and closing letters try to cleverly use metanarrative by telling the reader to avoid reading the book for all the horror that rests inside. The result, however, will only be the reader recoiling when they realize that the book fails to live up to its promise.