Content levels
Trigger warnings
Positive tags
Hero archetypes
Protagonist archetypes
Themes
Synopsis
"Alexander Cleave - a famous actor who "took to the stage to give myself a cast of characters to inhabit who would be ... of more weight and moment than I could ever hope to be" - faces the almost certain collapse of his thirty-year career. In physical and psychological retreat, he returns to his abandoned childhood home, believing that, away from his wife and daughter, away from the world at large, alone, without an audience of any kind, he might finally stop performing, catch himself in the act of living, and simply be.". "But the house is unexpectedly populated. There are Cleave's memories, which seem to rise up out of the house itself: of the years during his childhood when his mother took in boarders; of the beginnings, and the beginnings-of-the-end, of his career and his marriage; of the course of his relationship with his now estranged daughter; and of his father, who committed suicide when Cleave was still a boy. There are the corporeal, but illicit, inhabitants of the house: the caretaker, an unsettling presence "with the ageless aspect of a wastrel son," and the fifteen-year-old housekeeper, a "voluptuary of indolence." And there are the apparitions (ghosts? premonitions? visitations?) - a woman, a child, and a third, ill-defined figure - who Cleave feels are "intricately involved in the problem of whatever it is that has gone wrong with me."". "Struggling to determine what exactly has gone wrong, and to understand what part the apparitions play in his life and he in theirs, Cleave slowly comes to see the ways in which things and people - himself included - are not what they seem, and the ways in which, inevitably, they reveal what they are."--BOOK JACKET.
Is Eclipse appropriate for my child?
Suitable for most readers 16 and up.
This literary fantasy explores a middle-aged actor's psychological breakdown and retreat to his childhood home, where he confronts memories, apparitions, and his father's suicide. Contains mature themes of mental illness, family trauma, and existential crisis suitable for older teens and adults.
What to know going in
This book has mild violence, mild sexual content, and mild language. Content notes include suicide, death of parent, and grief (see the full list above).
Who'll love this
Older teens interested in psychological explorations and ghostly mysteries will find this introspective story about an actor facing his past compelling.