Review: The Guest Children by Patrick Tarr

The Guest Children by Patrick Tarr

Toronto: HarperCollins Canada, 2025

Heading into the fall and looking for some Spooky Season reading? This story of ghostly happenings at a mysterious lodge nestled in the forest at the edge of a lake in rural Ontario will fit the bill. I reviewed Patrick Tarr's debut novel for The British Columbia Review. This article was originally published on September 9, 2025 in The BC Review. 

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“After the bomb killed their mum and dad, Frances dragged Michael from the ruin of their home and ran into the smoke-shrouded street looking for help.” That harrowing opening introduces the tale of two children orphaned in the Blitz of London in the Second World War, their transport to the wilds of Ontario as “guest children,” and the man who is hired to find out what happened to them after they go missing. Vancouver-born, Toronto-based TV writer and producer Patrick Tarr has written a debut novel that offers the mystery of these missing children, and adds a layer of the otherworldly.

In 1940, young Frances and Michael Hawksby have lost their parents to World War II’s bombs and have been booked passage on a ship travelling to Canada so that they can stay with their Aunt Theresa and Uncle Simon, who own a beautiful resort called the Glass Point Lodge in rural Ontario. Not only have they lost their parents, but the ocean voyage is perilous and traumatizing, particularly for nine-year-old Michael. When they arrive at the resort in the thick woods on the edge of Blank Lake, all is not well.

On the lake, Glass Point looks like, “a bony finger jutting off the shore,” and, “faced with the isolation of where they’d be billeted until the war was over, Frances got a suffocating feeling, as if she’d stayed underwater for too long.” Their aunt and uncle are distant and there are a few peculiar guests at the lodge. In the meantime, “the forest had them cornered, crowding up to the lodge as if trying to push them off the land and into Blank Lake’s dark waters.” Michael likes his new environs a bit better than his sister, but in this first section, events surrounding these two become distinctly mysterious and end on an ominous note.

Author Patrick Tarr (photo: Marina Dempster)

Five years later, the war is over and Torontonian Randall Sturgess is looking for work. He didn’t sign up to fight overseas because he’d stayed home to care for his mentally unwell brother Edward. Randall feels a deep sense of shame about that, even though he had no real choice in the matter. The brothers’ story parallels that of Frances and Michael in that the brothers too were born in London, and after their father died in the Great War, “tens of thousands of orphans or paupers like us were pulled from destitution and sent to the colonies to find purpose in labour.” They were boarded with a horribly abusive couple on a rural farm, not far from Glass Point Lodge, as fate would have it.

Now, at the end of the WWII, no one has heard from the young Hawksby children or their aunt and uncle, and their last known whereabouts is the Glass Point Lodge. Randall takes a job that sees him travelling to the remote resort to investigate the missing children at the behest of their English family members. He leaves Edward to his own devices, barricaded in their apartment with food, but knows he must return as soon as possible. As he journeys to rural Ontario and across Blank Lake to Glass Point Lodge, memories of his own childhood trauma surface along with underlying guilt: his brother had suffered the worst under the hand of their foster parents.

Patrick Tarr

Randall’s journey from Toronto to the lodge is in itself a harrowing tale. He travels by boat and then by foot, becoming disoriented as he walks forested paths. Before he even gets to the lodge, he has mysterious experiences: a ramshackle cabin is more than it seems, and unnerving visions assail him. When he finally arrives, he meets Theresa and Simon, who are a bit off, and strangely unwelcoming. The lodge is host to a few long-term guests who are at turns fanciful, melancholy and mysterious. Each has their own reason for being at Glass Point Lodge, and it is delightfully unclear whether or not they are there by choice.

The hotel and the landscape–the forest most of all–are almost characters in their own right, giving the novel a slightly gothic feel. The forest is, “dank,” and “a hushed place of moss and toadstools, and felled trees in rot. There was deadfall all around, choked in climbing vines.” This oppressiveness mirrors the Glass Point Inn residents’ inner turmoil; each of them has suffered loss due to accident or war. Theresa and Simon lost their young son Gerald, and their grief becomes a tangible thing: “Perhaps in those long nights of grief, something was conjured out of the dark. Or perhaps there’s just something in this place that seeks out the broken people, the ones with holes in them that it can fill.”

And though I don’t want to give any spoilers away, it becomes clear soon in the narrative that, just maybe, there are ghosts here. Or at least something spectral; it’s not clear what exactly is going on. Are the spectres ghosts, collective delusion, or a little bit of magic realism? Speculating on this is one of the pleasures of the novel.

The story of the mysterious Glass Point Lodge, its eccentric guests, the missing children and Randall’s attempts to sort it all out kept me turning the pages eagerly. Tarr’s pacing is excellent, and the chapters flew by. His clever, mysterious novel kept me guessing throughout, and the way he brought the tale together at the end was a satisfying comment on the tricky nature of the way we mourn our dead. A novel that speaks to the personal nature of our ghosts and grief, Tarr highlights the complexity of the human experience of loss while telling a ripping good story.