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Have some Nachtstürm Castle with your Halloween

Fitting for this ghoulish day, Raquel Sallaberry of Jane Austen em português gives us another review of the Gothic Austen novel, Nachtstürm Castle which is available at Amazon.

I had never read a sequel or even a book inspired by the works of Jane Austen before, and when Laura from Girlebooks asked me to do a review, I was a bit concerned. Not that I am a purist, but I have read some discouraging words about these kinds of books. However curiosity was greater than the fear, and so I took a trip with the Tilneys.

The story begins one year after the marriage of Catherine and Henry Tilney, the nice couple of Northanger Abbey. Reverend Tilney decides to present his wife with a proper honeymoon, and what's better than a trip to the places of the novels which she loves so much--for example, The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe. The adventures begin in Paris where they visit the fabulous Notre Dame Cathedral and meet a gypsy and her sly little son who mysteriously calls Catherine "Fortuna". Later in the Opera House they meet a merry English couple who has just inherited a castle in the Alps, "just a small thing" as they describe it, and offer to let it to our heroes as place for their honeymoon. From that point on, the events become truly Gothic in style: troubled travel, rain and thunderstorms, odd servants, impossible loves, crimes, madness and death in a castle full of corridors with secret passages and rooms without exits, flanked by a deep chasm. The castle, very appropriately, is called Nachtstürm. Our beloved heroine passes unscathed through almost all the difficulties, and she harbors some suspicions and several certainties that her husband is behind the strange events. Our hero struggles to keep a good humor, even in desperate situations, as it is not his custom to be otherwise.

Like it's predecessor, the good humor of Henry Tilney and an archaic linguistic style--as far as I can understand, being a speaker of a foreign language--was retained by the author, Emily C.A. Snyder. This is what really captivated me. I read it with pleasure, and I assure you it is real fun!

See this review in Portuguese on Raquel's blog.