In 2021, The Thirteenth Tale was making rounds as the new popular release. I felt fortunate to snag one before the hold lines got too long. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t read it again.

Premise: This story begins with our heroine, Margaret Lea, who is an aspiring biographer and fulltime employee of her father’s rare book collections bookstores. A letter arrives for Margaret with instructions to arrive to the household of the famous Vida Winter. Vida Winter is a world famous and elusive author of 12 renowned authors. Winters has always kept her past a secret from her devoted fans, but with her health dramatically failing each day, she is ready to tell the world the truth about where she really came from. And she believes that only Margaret has the heart to share the honest truth.

Like Margaret, the readers are quickly sucked into Winters origin story, as she takes Margaret back to the unsolved mysteries of the generation before her. The suspense is thick and suspicion cast on each family member as Winters pointedly reveals the clues and answers that her house has hidden so well.

As all suspense stories play out, it’s typical for the author to reveal an important a twist ending at the conclusion of the book. The Thirteeth Tale is no exception to this. While I pride myself on usually deciphering the twist ending before its grand reveal, I was not successful in my guesswork this time around! The Thirteenth’s Tale’s plot twist was carefully planted throughout the story, eventually exposing all the characters and their secrets.

Caution:

This book contains themes of incest, rape, and child neglect. I do wish that books would come with trigger warnings within its first page.

To its credit, the incest themes are made known early on into the story, instead of as a horrifying end conclusion. On the flip side though, when these types of dark themes are revealed at the start of a book, it tends to soften the blow for the ending themes.

My Takeaway:

The garrulous descriptions of the dusty bookshop and nobility of a book makes the reader proud to be holding a book in their hands at that very moment. I’m still puzzling over how this dedicated description of books ties in the overarching themes. Perhaps it was a setup that sharing the stories of horrific events is how we cope with trauma. Something to think about.

Overall Recommendation?

I don’t recommend this book for those who have similar tastes to mine. The story, though brilliantly written, was too disturbing for me to read in gory detail. However, I would have been pleased to read the plot summary on Wikipedia to get the general gist of the plot. That would have satisfied my curiosity while keeping my emotional shock factors to a minimum 🙂