Before reading The Ghosts of Merry Hall by Heather Davey you might think that it is bound to be a run of the mill ghost story and while it does have elements similar to most other ghost stories, it also has something extra that just feels a bit more interesting.
After the breakdown of her marriage, Nell moves with her 16-year-old daughter, Fern, to the small town where her mother grew up determined to start a brand new life. It’s not long before they find themselves living in a crumbling, gothic mansion called Merry Hall. But this is no ordinary house. Objects move about, strange noises can be heard and they quickly begin to feel very unsettled.
In the 1840s, Dolly, a young albino woman is seduced by a showman who brings her into his group of performing ‘freaks’ and together they travel around the country entertaining. But Dolly’s life will soon change.
Told in alternating timelines, The Ghosts of Merry Hall switches back and forth between the perspectives of Nell and Dolly. I think you’ll most likely connect with one character more than the other. For me, it was Dolly. While I didn’t dislike Nell’s perspective, I sometimes found that I was waiting to get back to Dolly’s perspective because it was slightly more interesting. Nell has a quite unfortunate life and her worries felt more real to me which is perhaps why I wasn’t obsessed with reading about them. I think the idea of historical freakshows is also fascinating as they were so barbaric and most often run by the worst men you can imagine. However, while I did find the historical aspects of this book the most interesting, I did very much enjoy the relationship between Nell and her daughter, Fern. It starts off as what you’d expect between a mother and a teenager daughter whose entire life has just been uprooted. They have a complicated dynamic but it develops in a fantastic way and I actively wanted them to be happy towards the end.
I find that in most books where the characters are attempting to figure out if their houses are haunted, the reader also spends the majority of the book trying to figure it out too – but that’s not really the case with this book. We learn quite early on that Dolly is around in 2025 as well and read from her perspective often. I very much enjoyed this aspect because there’s nothing I hate quite as much as expecting a book to be about ghosts only to get to the end and it was all in the characters heads or someone was messing with them.
This isn’t just a book about ghosts. It’s about escaping a controlling marriage, the struggles of growing up with an alcoholic mother and how this can affect you for the rest of your life, the complicated relationships between a mother and her teenage daughter, a little bit about the horrors of freakshows and the men that run them. It’s a slightly spooky book but not one that will keep you up at night.
The Ghosts of Merry Hall was also a pretty quick book to read. It’s not particularly short but I found myself speeding through it. The short chapters and the fact that I felt like I needed to find out what happened to Dolly meant that I read this book in less than a day. It’s definitely one I’d recommend picking up, although you might want to wait until winter as that’s when it’s set!
