Celeste and her identical twin brother, Noble, are close until a accident takes Noble's live. It's a loss that pushes their mother, a woman obsessed with ghosts and the afterlife, over the edge. Desperate to keep her son alive, Celeste's mother forces her to cut her hair, wear boy's clothes and take Noble's identity. Celeste has virtually disappeared until a boy moves in next door and Celeste will risk her mother's warth to let herself comes back to life.
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" Celeste" is the story of a girl on the edge of a breakdown and the story of her mother, who you don't really know if she sees the ghosts she claims to or if she is simply an unbalanced woman or both.
The review of this Book prepared by Greg Bryant
Pocket, Apr 2004, 7.99
ISBN: 0743428625
Twins Noble and Atwell are part of a close knit family though their Mommy Sarah favors her son over her daughter. Mommy takes the children to purchase amulets to ward off evil over the concerns of her increasingly worried husband Arthur that Sarah is over the edge and their kids are suffering. Not long afterward, Arthur, a skeptic of mystic powers, dies from a cerebral aneurism. Mommy knows that the spirits took Arthur away because he failed to heed her advice about protection.
Mommy becomes displeased and concerned when Celeste displays mystical prowess before Noble. At a nearby stream, Celeste and Noble push and pull with his fishing rod. When she lets go, he falls, cracks his head on a rock, and dies in the accident. Mommy is stunned that her “daughter” died as from now on Celeste is to be Noble and she is so convincing that the authorities believe the female twin died. Though a bit confused, Celeste's personality wanes over the years as with Mommy's impetus Noble takes over until adolescence sets in encouraged by Elliot moving next door.
Though CELESTE is the author's usual theme of a dysfunctional family in which the suffering of the children from deranged adults surface in adolescence, C.V. Andrews provides an intriguing thriller. Still the initial reactions that Celeste could not pose as Noble and how did the authorities get fooled are overcome when one realizes how isolated the twins were and how Mommy believed that the girl died. Though Mommy seems out of the Bates Motel, Celeste as Noble and later as female yearnings surface makes for a fine tale that will excite fans of the author.
Harriet Klausner
The review of this Book prepared by Harriet Klausner
