Book recommendation: Grandma’s Little Darling, by Stephen R. George

So, I have another older novel for you today. This time, however, it’s not a novel by one of my favourite authors — or even an author I had heard of before picking up the book. But that didn’t stop me from wanting to read it.

While Grandma’s Little Darling has the somewhat common premise of an older character stealing the youth of a younger character, it’s presented in a way that I haven’t really read before. I was curious about how Stephen R. George would work with the idea of stealing someone’s youth, and so I eagerly added the novel to my collection. Once I began reading, the premise had me hooked.

Nora, a young orphan, has been through her share of foster homes, but has yet to find a family with whom she truly feels at home. But when her Cheryl, one of the orphanage’s counselors, takes Nora to the Jacobson family, Nora feels that maybe she has finally found a family she can call her own. There’s just one problem: Grandma. The woman moved in with the Jacobsons after a recent stroke, making her an addition to the house the family hadn’t been expecting. And Nora isn’t entirely sure why, but she gets the feeling Grandma wants more from her than she lets on.

While this novel does have a lot of appealing aspects — I liked most of the characters, and found that I could relate to a few of them fairly well — I think my favourite aspect is the plot itself. The way Grandma intends to steal Nora’s youth is quite different from the usual “sapping” of youth, and I wanted to know if she’d be able to get away with her plan. Not because I wanted her to be able to, but because I wanted to see how Nora could potentially regain her youth if it was to be stolen from her — or if it was even possible for her to regain it.

I won’t tell you exactly what happened, but I will tell you that the ending wasn’t quite what I was expecting. It left me with a lot to think about.The way the novel ended changed my perspective of some of the characters quite drastically, and I’m still not quite sure how I feel about them.