PositiveObserverLike in the prolific letters Plath wrote to her mother and her therapist—a huge bulk of which were made public last year—Plath’s attention to detail is remarkable ... The experience of reading Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom cannot be separated from what we know is coming: an imminent doom made all the more horrific by the blissful ignorance of the other passengers on the train ... One can see the foreboding precursors in Mary Ventura to the book for which [Plath] has been immortalized ... In The Ninth Kingdom, though, Mary manages to resist the darkness that lies ahead.
