"Marilee awoke with a start. It was the same dream she had been having for the past year. Why did this dream continue to haunt her?"
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Dreams in the Mist: Loyalist House Season I by Barbara Nattress Trafford Publishing
book review by Karyn Saemann
The new owners of a historic bed and breakfast cope with laundry, artisan muffin baking... and a ghost. Even before she and her husband, Phillip, buy the stately riverfront home in southern Ontario, Marilee dreams about a young woman who tragically died on the property 200 years earlier. The story of the girl, named Hannah, plays out as the narrative alternates between the present and the past. Phillip and Marilee are genuine and charming, good neighbors and doting grandparents. Their Loyalist House bed and breakfast is the kind of place guests annually return to. The author's real-life ownership of a bed and breakfast lends authenticity and her deep familiarity with southern Ontario's landscape and history enrich the tale.
The book is short, just 140 pages, with bed and breakfast recipes filling the final 20 pages. Nattress' writing is succinct and fun to read. The author effectively connects the past and present via elements such as an attic window that both Hannah and Marilee peer through. The core story, already rich in detail and drama, has great potential as a longer, full-fledged novel. Intermittent moments of true spookiness, such as when Marilee removes Hannah's doll from an old trunk to later find it inexplicably returned, cry out for further development. Expanding the ghost story, consigning daily bed and breakfast operations to subtler background color, bringing in dialogue and preserving the story's existing warmth and sincerity could combine to elevate this to a full-length novel. Potential exists, too, for a series of ghostly mysteries set on the property and in the surrounding community. A wonderful basis that could grow into much more.