The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

A very good read.  Not quite as good as I had hoped.  The end bothered me, and I tossed & turned over it this morning (which is why I'm up and writing this at 6:30).  I'll put my rambling thoughts at the bottom.  It is an absolutely worthwhile read, one that unfolds beautifully, bit by bit, so reading my last paragraph would definitely spoil that enjoyment. 

Instead, some passages that I loved:

• There is something about words.  In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner.  Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, adn when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts.  Inside you they work their magic.
• People disappear when they die.  Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath.  Their flesh.  Eventually their bones.  All living memory of them ceases.  This is both dreadful and natural.  Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation.  For in the books they write they continue to exist.  We can rediscover them.  Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods.  Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy.  They  can comfort you.  They can perplex you.  They can alter you.  All this, even though they are dead.  Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved.  It is a kind of magic.
• When I came to myself Dr. Clifton was there.  He put an arm around me.  "I know," he said.  "I know."  He iddn't know, of course, Not really.  And yet that was what he said, and I was soothed to hear it.  For I knew what he meant.  We all have our sorrows, and although the exact delineaments, weight and dimensions of grief are different for everyone, the color of grief is common to us all.  "I know, " he said, because he was human, and therefore, in a way, he did.

*SPOILER*

I loved theplot & the subplots (Hester, Vida's doctor, John the Dig, etc..), but was very frustrated by the fact that the writer never clearly delineates which sister survived.  Even with disfigurement from the fire, the two girls were so fundamentally different that I'm positive Vida Winters knew who she had pulled out eventually.  My first inclination is that Emmeline died, because Vida buried her old life from that moment forward.  I imagine that only the grief of losing that dear one could cause such extremity.  On the other hand, I don't think Adeline could have functioned so normally for so many years.  Did they constantly guard her against violence?  It just doesn't jive for me that it was her.  Any thoughts?