I'm going to have to turn up my CD player for A Sudden Light, The narration put me to sleep before the first CD was over.

I'm glad I stuck with the book. It did improve as the chapters passed - before the halfway point. I disliked Trevor at first, but he turned out to be a nice kid. I grew to despise his aunt long before the book was over. The father and grandfather improved, as well. (The story about how the grandfather lost some of the fingers of his left hand was horrifying.)

Trevor's great-great uncle Ben's love story was tragic. No wonder his ghost is hanging around the house. There are other family secrets that Trevor uncovers, some with the help of his ghostly ancestors.

The last two CDs were the best. If not for the early chapters, I'd give this book four stars. ( )

This is a bookclub book. It's ok but a little unrealistic. ( )

This is the second book I've read by this author (the first being The Art of Racing in the Rain, which I have read several times). I had high hopes for this book based on this, plus the gothic setting and the promise of a good ghost story really appealed to me.

The book started off really well. The writing succeeds in making Riddell House sound sinister and a place of dark secrets, and a place that would be really good fun to explore if you were a 14 year old boy (or someone who hasn't grown up yet, like me). I liked the spooky happenings and the characters I couldn't quite trust in. It was gearing up to be an interesting and intriguing read, to find out the house's secrets and the intentions of the people who lived there. I also really wanted to see if Trevor's parents would get back together.

I really enjoyed the story for the first 200 or so pages, it got off to a cracking pace and I enjoyed spending time with the main character and exploring the house and its contents (which seemed to have been missed by everyone else in the story apart from Trevor, which I couldn't quite fathom). It was at the point where he starts reading journal entries that I started losing interest in the story. It is vary rare that I enjoy reading journals / letters etc in stories as I feel it can spoil the pace of the narrative, which it did for me here. I skimmed through much of the middle section of the book and thankfully the journal entries didn't carry on until the end. However, after this point, there were so many themes and stories, both past and present, taking place that the story became unsure of quite what to be. The end of the book didn't surprise me or reveal anything new, and everything was resolved, but I was left wanting more from this story. ( )

Very well done. It was such a smooth pace, vivid imagery. The main character's POV was deep and the perfect perspective. It was a somber read, but the adventure, suspense, mystery and hope woven in left me with a reverence for honesty, the future, and family and a bit of uplifting buoyancy.

I really appreciated the paranormal aspect as it wasn't over-done and lent a bit of the spiritual to the realism.

I think it will appeal to a wide audience - those interested in general fiction, historical fiction, mystery, the paranormal, psychology, and writers - over a variety of ages. ( )

This book was amazing and worth all five out of five stars, without a doubt. 'A Sudden Light' is an American Gothic masterpiece that is centered around the Riddell family, chronicling their self-destructive demise over the decades. Garth Stein is able to expertly weave multiple stories into a cohesive tale that is as heartbreaking, as it is hopeful.

We step into the story through Trevor Riddell's eyes, the latest member of the Riddell family, as he joins his father, Jones, to the ancestral house in Washington state. Trevor is there to help his father "settle things," which at the start seems simple. Simply sell the property and divide the money so that Jones can reunite with his recently estranged wife and the three can be a family again. Matters become complicated when the history of the land reveals itself via ghosts and secret writings which plague Trevor, forcing him to choose between saving his parents' marriage and doing the right thing. He meets the ghost of his great grand-uncle, Ben, who died a tragic death at a young age. Ben makes himself visible to Trevor, pleading for him to help end the Riddell family misfortune and set him free. You see, after Ben's death, his father Elijah redrew his will explicitly stating his wishes that the land and home they owned, known as The North Estate, would be given back to nature. Once his descendants decided to move out of the house, it would be turned into a state park/nature preserve as a method of penance for forcing his son Ben to go against his nature, and for all of the land he helped destroy during the westward expansion. So far, his wishes have been grudgingly adhered to until recently.

Trevor's aunt, 'Simply' Serena, has been living at The North Estate her entire life, and became her father's caretaker upon the death of her mother. She summons her brother, Jones, to the house with the hope that he will be able to convince their father Samuel to either sell the property, or sign over the rights so that they could sell it. Throughout the novel, there is a feeling that something isn't right with Serena and that she has a hidden agenda with her desire to sell the property. Stein does a fantastic job in writing her character and creating the constant state of unease and suspicion readers feel when she appears. He truly shows his skill in handling Serena's character, as her problematic upbringing would automatically incite sympathy and understanding from readers, yet seen through her current actions, there is only a mild afterthought of pity.

A Sudden Light has all of the trappings of a typical American Gothic novel: family secrets, ghosts, the conflict of the rational and irrational, festering guilt, possible incest, and of course, a sprawling landscape in neglected decay reflecting the conflict and misery of its inhabitants, both living and deceased. It is a superb book that is so absorbing, readers will not be able to put it down until they reach the end. ( )