Let me start this review by saying that Mark Haddon's "Curious Incident of he Dog in the Nighttime" is one of my all time favourites - so I was excited to get into this author's latest release. Unfortunately, it was completely disappointing. Another unhappy family, unhappy in its own way. The narrative was completely disjointed - each paragraph break had a new narrator that often wasn't readily revealed. And ultimately, very little happened. I'm sad to say, that this one was a total miss. Skip it.

I loved Mark Haddon's best seller The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. I haven't read any of his other books, but based on that one read I was eager to pick up his latest - The Red House. Richard and Angela are brother and sister living in England. They rarely see each other, but following the death of their mother, Richard, a wealthy doctor, invites his sister, her husband and their three children to vacation with him for a week in the country side. Richard has recently remarried and his new wife and step daughter will also be there. You can see lots of angst and fodder for thought in just the set up - estrangement, death, grief, family squabbles and more. Angela and her family are rife with problems. I've had this book for a bit and have been picking it up and putting it down, unable to consume it at prolonged sittings. The book is told in a 'stream of conciousness' narrative. Each of the eight characters' thoughts and actions can appear at any time. Many times it's not clear who is speaking - chapters begin with She for example. As I read further and began to know each character and their way of thinking it became easier to identify the current speaker. But, then sometimes Haddon throws in passages from a book someone is reading or lists of things that really have no bearing on anything. The Red House has been leaping onto bestseller lists everywhere. I find myself feeling a bit lost, like the kid who doesn't get the joke. For I found Red House disconcerting, disturbing and demoralizing by turns. Although I agree that Haddon's explorations of his characters' desires, needs and wants are quite intimate and thought provoking, I could only take so much at a sitting. Hence, the length of time it took me to finish the book. There's no denying that Haddon has explored family dysfunction in great depth with an inventive vehicle to carry those observations. However, there seemed to be no resolution from first page to last. The characters are still nursing the same angst as they were in the beginning. I realize that not every book needs to have a happy ending or ends all tied up, but I felt no sense of satisfaction on turning the last page. Rather, just relief that I had finished.

http://www.cozylittlebookjournal.com/2012/04/red-house-by-mark-haddon.html The premise is simple: two estranged adult siblings, Angela and Richard, bring their families on vacation together for a week in the English countryside. Angela is married with three children, while Richard has recently remarried and now has a teen stepdaughter. But, in true Mark Haddon style, the telling of the story of these eight people is anything but simple. The story is told from the perspective of each character nearly simultaneously, like a stream-of-consciousness novel in octet form. Think Dawn French's A Tiny Bit Marvellous meets Virginia Woolf's The Waves. If there's one thing that Mark Haddon has proven time and time again (well, two times--The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time and A Spot of Bother), it's that he is not afraid to take his readers inside the mind of a character, even if that character does not think the same way as most people. In The Curious Incident, he took us inside the mind of a boy with autism, and in Spot he wrote from the perspective of a man slowly losing his mind (but not wanting to bother anyone about it). So Mark Haddon is up for a challenge. The challenge of The Red House is not that any of the characters is particularly inaccessible, it's that we are asked to access all of them at the same time. They lie to each other, they misunderstand, they keep secrets, they fail to see the whole story, all while trying very hard to be honest with each other (at which they also fail). It's a lovely novel and a satisfying read, though not one I would recommend for morning commuters hoping to get in a little reading on the bus or subway. It's a novel that requires your full attention, that asks you to fall into its rhythm, that takes you on a journey to somewhere probably not very far from your own family. Disclaimer: I received a digital galley of this book free from the publisher from NetGalley.com. I was not obliged to write a favourable review, or even any review at all. The opinions expressed are strictly my own.