Blog Tour | Mirrorland - Carole Johnstone

 

Cat lives in Los Angeles, about as far away as she can get from her estranged twin sister El and No. 36 Westeryk Road, the imposing gothic house in Edinburgh where they grew up. As girls, they invented Mirrorland, a dark, imaginary place under the pantry stairs full of pirates, witches, and clowns. These days Cat rarely thinks about their childhood home, or the fact that El now lives there with her husband Ross.

But when El mysteriously disappears after going out on her sailboat, Cat is forced to return to the grand old house, which has scarcely changed in twenty years. No. 36 Westeryk Road is still full of shadowy, hidden corners, and at every turn Cat finds herself stumbling on long-held secrets and terrifying ghosts from the past. Because someone—El?—has left Cat clues all over the house: a treasure hunt that leads right back to Mirrorland, where she knows the truth lies crouched and waiting…

 Mirrorland is a thriller on paper, but very different to any I have read for a while. Set to the backdrop of the imposing streets of Edinburgh, Mirrorland weaves imagination with reality to bring alive a twin sister's worst nightmare and reveal shocking memories she has been determined to bury. 

The premise seems simple - twin sister goes missing, presumed dead. Other twin goes looking, receives warning messages, not sure who to trust anymore. However, Mirrorland is a little more complex than it perhaps at first seems and I will admit that at first I underestimated the depth the story would go into. On Cat's return to the home in Edinburgh she lived in as a child, she is instantly transported back to the imaginative play her and her sister, El, used to indulge in. At first, the reader can find this disorientating. It's like trying to explain to your friends that you used to have an imaginary friend and going into depth about all the fantastic memories you shared. Your friends wouldn't understand, they'd look at you funny and never be able to understand quite what your imagination experienced. At first, I was that friend, looking on perplexed at the depth of memories that Cat was sharing and not quite seeing their relevance to the story. But Carole Johnstone is subtle with her reveals and it soon became clear that this imaginary world that was being revealed had some foundations in reality and these foundations would soon become central to the main story being played out. 

As Cat begins to receive mysterious letters referring back to her childhood, her insistence that El must be alive and delivering these letters to her grows stronger. Each letter reveals another secret from Mirrorland and the reader is treated to another memory that slowly fills another hole in Cat's memory jigsaw. I enjoyed the fact that Cat is as much in the dark about her memories as we are. Initially as she reminisces they seem like childish memories but as they delve deeper into her past her memories are awakened, just as we as readers are also enlightened. 

After a slow start, which in hindsight was needed to build the imaginary land of Mirrorland in the reader's mind, the book really picks up from about half way in. The gothic house settings really comes into its own, providing multiple opportunities for things that go bump in the night, doorbells that ring unaided and menacing, chasing footsteps. By this time, just like Cat, you are questioning what is real and what is imagined. 

The twists and turns keep coming and for me, just as I thought the mystery had been solved and I was happy with the conclusion, it all unravelled again with one huge final reveal. It was definitely a case of expect the unexpected and I love a story that is completely unpredictable, yet delivers a believable and satisfying ending. 

Mirrorland offers a thrilling plot, set in almost parallel universes of reality and imagination. It intertwines the happiness and fear of a childhood and delivers disturbing twists which are perfect for readers who, like me, are always sceptical and think they can guess the ending!