‘The Girl at the Window’ by Rowan Coleman is a glorious mixture of ghosts, grief and the Yorkshire moors of the Brontës. With three timelines to juggle, the novel’s structure is held together by a real house, Ponden Hall, and its true links to Emily Brontë. Mixing historical fact with flights of imagination - the letters of a 17th century servant Agnes - there is a lot going on. Central are the themes of grief, the different types of love and mother/child relationships.
Trudy Heaton’s husband Abe is missing presumed dead after a plane crash in South America, so she takes their son Will to her childhood home, Ponden Hall in Yorkshire. Tru’s return is wondrous and difficult, a return to the old house and moors she loved near Haworth, home to the Brontës; but also an awkward reunion with Ma, with whom she has not spoken for 16 years. When Tru finds a loose page from a diary written by Emily Brontë, who visited the house and used its library, and some 17th century documents by an Agnes Heaton, she starts a hunt for the truth. At the same time she must renovate the almost derelict house, and help Will negotiate his new life without his father in a strange place. Will likes Ponden Hall, the Granny he has never met before, and Mab the old retriever, but he acquires an imaginary friend. Also hovering on the scene is Marcus Ellis, house restorer and Brontë addict, who arrives to assess the repairs needed and grants available to save Ponden Hall. Ma doesn’t like Marcus’s neat blue jeans, Tru finds him unsettlingly calm, and Will likes the computer games and wi-fi at Marcus’s ultra-modern home.
And all the time, Will expects his father to return and asks his mother why she stopped looking for him. As both mother and son process their grief, the losses, brutality and bereavements of other generations at Ponden Hall are uncovered. Has Tru found a story previously uncovered only by Emily Brontë, and did Emily leave an unfinished second novel hidden somewhere at Ponden Hall?
The adventure and excitement of a bookish girl, searching for real... ‘the existence of a childhood dream come true, almost like finding a snowy forest at the back of a wardrobe.’
Another immersive read on holiday for me, 4* rather than 5* because of some unbelievable elements and impracticalities which took me away from the world on the page and made me wonder... ‘but’. To avoid spoilers I can’t be more specific but they are not ghost or Brontë-related.
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‘Every Heaton knows that Ponden Hall does have dark corners, deep shadows and lost stories caught within its history, fleeting shadows that are gone the moment you look at them. But every Heaton loves it nevertheless.’

The Brontë children reportedly considered Ponden Hall a second home, visiting the library and making friends with the Heaton family. The house later captured Emily’s imagination when she was writing Wuthering Heights, immortalising an old box bed by a window in one room at the Hall as the setting for Cathy’s ghostly return. Following in Emily’s literary footsteps, Rowan Coleman has also chosen the old farmhouse as the setting for her novel, a ‘haunting love story’ spanning the centuries.

When Trudy Heaton loses her beloved husband in a plane crash, she and her eight year old son seek sanctuary and solace back in Yorkshire, returning to the family home of Ponden Hall to stay with Trudy’s reclusive ‘Ma’. Trudy and her mother haven’t spoken since she left home to get married and have a baby at seventeen, and Trudy’s son Will refuses to accept that his father is dead, but Ponden Hall is still a welcome distraction, especially when the house starts to give up its secrets to Trudy. While starting the daunting task of restoring the neglected and decaying house, Trudy discovers a bundle of papers telling the life story of a seventeenth century servant named Agnes – bound in a letter from Emily Brontë, who hoped to give voice to Agnes in a second novel, The House at Scar Gill. Trudy is overwhelmed by her discovery, like any devoted reader of the Brontës would be, and sets about trying to find Emily’s hidden manuscript – but she is not the only treasure hunter seeking the prize.

Rowan Coleman brings Ponden Hall back to the gothic glory of Wuthering Heights, reinstating the Heaton family, the last member of which actually left the house in 1898, and creating a tapestry of light and dark, love and loss, from both fact and fiction. Ponden Kirk and the Parsonage are also key locations. Henry Casson, who haunts both the house and Agnes’ narrative, was real but later entered local folklore as ‘Greybeard’, a ghostly omen of death. And the story told to Trudy by her father of Lily Cove, an adventurous young woman who fell to her death while parachuting from a hot air balloon over Ponden in 1906, is also true. Agnes’ story, while both fictional and far-fetched – Trudy herself points out ‘That a girl of her age and social standing was writing and recording her life in the mid-seventeenth century was remarkable in itself’ – is also suitably dark and disturbing for a subplot dedicated to Emily.

However, there are one too many irons in the fire for either Agnes or Trudy’s story to really work. In between Trudy and her precocious son struggling to cope without Abe, Trudy’s husband – whose fate is telegraphed from the first chapter – there is also the rather forced romance of ‘Tru and Abe’, told in flashback, which still didn’t convince me. Both Agnes and Robert Heaton in the 1650s and ‘Tru and Abe’ in modern times are supposed to echo Heathcliff and Cathy in the strength of their bond, but both fall short, sadly. Cathy and Heathcliff are either star-cross’d lovers or the original toxic relationship, depending on your view, but what they have is developed by word and deed throughout the novel, not forced on the reader’s imagination (‘each new embrace ignited fresh emotions, stitching us closer still, so much a part of one another that he became me, I became him’).

The Girl at the Window is a stimulating read which will keep the pages turning for all readers, although suspension of disbelief is a definite prerequisite! Some of the twists and turns are a little obvious and unnecessary – not every plot thread needs to be forced into a happy ending – but Brontë fans will no doubt share Trudy’s excitement over the dream of a second novel from Emily. And the real Ponden Hall, now a bed and breakfast, is waiting (in far better condition!) to inspire more writers like Emily and Rowan! ( )

The Girl at the Window is what I call a wow book. It's simply stunning from the very beginning to the very end, all 440 pages of it. Not a short book, by any means, but in my opinion not one word is surplus to requirements.

The story is very much set around Ponden Hall on the Yorkshire moors and it most definitely is a character in its own right. When Trudy returns to her childhood home after losing her husband, Abe, it feels like the right thing to do. It's so much more than just a house. She takes her 8 year old son, Will, with her and it's the first time he's met his grandmother due to an estrangement between her and Trudy.

Ponden Hall is where Emily Brontë is thought to have got her inspiration for Wuthering Heights and where she spent some time before her untimely death. Already it's a magical place. Add in Rowan Coleman's storytelling skills and it's even more exquisite.

There's so much going on in this book and yet it never felt overcrowded. There's the obvious grief that Trudy and Will are suffering. There's the difficult mother/daughter relationship where they have to learn to live together again after so many years. Then there's Trudy's discovery in the house of items that could change history, along with the Brontë connection and the story of another Ponden Hall resident, Agnes. It's all wonderfully atmospheric and full of those lovely little details that I love. There's much going through records, searching through boxes, delving into archives, exploring dusty stacks for something long hidden. It captivated me and I just didn't want to leave this fascinating story alone for a minute.

Added to this is the ghostly element at the hall. Over the years, ghosts have made their home at the hall too. I'm not a believer in ghosts and yet I totally believed in them in this story. Coleman hits exactly the right tone of plausibility.

The writing is sublime, the plotline is inspired and imaginative, I felt empathy with the characters and of course, there's the setting. The beautiful and bleak Yorkshire moors of Wuthering Heights come back to life in The Girl at the Window. I thought it was a completely gorgeous read and one that will probably find its way onto my books of the year list. ( )

To me, this seemed no better than the average melodramatic romance -which I avoid like the plague- fully equipped with one-dimensional characters and atrocious dialogue. Tru and Will are the most boring mother-son figures you’ll ever come across. But these aren’t the major issues. What made this a nightmare was the writer’s audacity to include Emily Brontë and Wuthering Heights in her soap-opera/cry-me-a-river abomination down to a bad mimicking of names and themes. Have some common decency, writer….

It was heroic on my part that I was able to reach the 50% mark before I toss this one into oblivion.

Many thanks to Penguin Random House and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review. ( )