THE MERCY PAPERS: A MEMOIR OF THREE WEEKS

By Robin Romm, Scribner, 224 pages, $22

A strange thing happened while I was reading this memoir from a daughter on her mom's death: My own mother died.

I had just finished part one of the book, which details the decline of the author's mother from cancer. Or, more accurately, it details how the author is reacting to and dealing with her mom's decline. The call from my sister came unexpectedly early the next morning. I thought at first that I wouldn't finish the book because it might be too painful. However, the book attempts to put into words what it feels like to have someone close to you die. So I picked it up with a new purpose and need.

Part two is short and tells about making arrangements and the funeral. Did I find anything helpful or comforting? No. Maybe it was because of the differing circumstances: Romm was 28, and her mother was relatively young and died of cancer. I am 48, and my mother was 84 and died in her sleep. In the final few paragraphs of the book, Romm writes about the things she did to find comfort after her mom's death. She says: "I went to a free support group at the local hospice center. I listened to women talk about the pain of losing their mothers at eighty, ninety, ninety-eight. I wrung my hands and kept very quiet, afraid that I would begrudge them their grief since they'd had so much time to be daughters."

That statement validated the feeling I'd had throughout the book: that she really wasn't talking to me at all.

JUDY ROMANOWICH SMITH

NEWS DESIGNER

THE SéANCE

By John Harwood (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 352 pages, $25)

Harwood's previous novel, "The Ghost Writer," delightfully proved that he knows his Victorian authors of the macabre -- with shades of Wilkie Collins, Sheridan Le Fanu and Henry James, among others. In "The Séance," he shows that he also knows what the gothic novel was before today's vampires and shape-shifters turned it into a nightclub hot spot.

In the 19th century, it was primarily about creating an atmosphere of foreboding: the famous "dark and stormy night." Harwood's heroine, Constance Langton, who grew up in a family that was in perpetual mourning, finds just that in the dark, dripping and isolated Wraxford Hall -- which she receives as a mysterious inheritance. At the hall, years before, a family disappeared. Could she be the infant who vanished then? Is that why her "parents" were so cold and distant? Why is she advised to "sell the Hall unseen, burn it to the ground and plow the earth with salt ... but never live there ..."? Séances, mesmerism and a dark-hearted villain are also part of her future. As opposed to contemporary gothic heroines, who are part ninja and superhero, she tends to swoon a lot. All the more goose-pimply fun.

JARRETT SMITH,

FEATURES LAYOUT EDITOR