Reviews for The Ghost at the Table

The average rating for The Ghost at the Table based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-01-27 00:00:00 James Burkholder I always love a good dysfunctional holiday family story, and this one didn't disappoint. Anyone who knows me has heard me go on ad nauseam about my theory of subjective reality, and this book is to a large extent about that. Is it great literature? No, but it's extremely readable and engaging, and keeps you guessing as you think about families and the way we all individually perceive and process group experiences.

Review # 2 was written on 2010-03-20 00:00:00 Gavin Hunter The concept of this nicely written book was pretty interesting, and possibly a good choice for people who like dysfunctional family sagas. Cynnie (an appropriate moniker; short for Cynthia but I kept thinking "cynical," which was probably intentional) reluctantly travels east for Thanksgiving to visit her older sister Frances. Upon reaching Frances's place, she learns that their elderly and ailing estranged father who was supposedly placed in a nursing home will actually be with them for Thanksgiving. Their father is estranged from them for good reason -- after their terminally ill mother's suspiciously abrupt death when Cynthia and Frances were teenagers, their father revealed his longstanding affair with a woman 20 years his junior whom he subsequently married with unseemly haste, packing his daughters off to boarding school. While Frances wishes to whitewash the past and goes to all kinds of lengths to do so, Cynthia resents this and prefers the brutally real version of things. The two sisters and their father, together for Thanksgiving with a roomful of guests at a dinner artfully planned and executed by Frances, is a recipe for drama. Except that I didn't quite get the drama once it happened. Who did kill their mother? Did anyone? And the stuff that came after -- huh? Lots of foreshadow, sometimes draggy, leading up to...a little confusion, at least for this reader. I did like the concept of conflict between a sister who yearns to revise the past and another sister who insists on angry truths; I thought it was kind of interesting to ponder who was right (or even reliable), and I thought the book did a good job exploring that ambiguity. Other questions, though, were kind of dropped. In the beginning, Walter implies that Frances is having some kind of nervous breakdown; at the end, it almost seems like it was Cynthia's nervous breakdown. Sort of. Like I said, I don't think I really got it. If anyone understood this book better than I did, I'd love to hear their thoughts. In fact, I think I'll go and read some other goodreads reviews now to see if I can get some more clarity (way to put off cleaning my kitchen).