Reviews with content warning for Bullying - Within These Wicked Walls

Don’t you just hate when the premise you’ve heard for a story doesn’t quite live up to the story that’s told? Well, I’m happy to report that this is solidly NOT the case for Lauren Blackwood’s debut novel, Within These Wicked Walls—a horror novel targeted towards the older end of the young adult audience. Billed as an Ethiopian-inspired fantasy retelling of Jane Eyre, this book lives up to the high bar set by its description.

Andromeda is a magic practitioner—a debtera, to be exact—who has trained extensively in crafting amulets of protection for various usage, including against powerful curses such as the one at the secluded Rochester mansion. Not quite a retelling, this mansion is located outside of an Ethiopian-inspired village rather than an English hamlet. Magnus Rochester is a twenty-two year old man of mixed heritage who not only inherited his English father’s exorbitant wealth, but his most relentless and deadly curse as well—the Evil Eye. Since the curse affects any household that he builds, Magnus has settled into a life limited to socializing with those who serve his home, his lawyer, and the lawyer’s sister. So when Andromeda enters his life, Magnus has all the bad habits of a rich guy who has only interacted with people paid to serve him in one manner or another. Andromeda pushes Magnus to examine this dynamic and how he manages the personnel issues among the staff, some of whom would like to see her status within the mansion taken down a peg. The real problem? Mansion staff has increasingly–and mysteriously—diminished so that by the time Andromeda takes on her role of ridding the mansion of its curse, there are only four members of staff left.

Read more here: https://blackgirlscreate.org/2021/10/the-plot-thickens-within-these-wicked-walls/

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adventurous challenging dark emotional funny hopeful inspiring mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

“Eventually I got used to monsters. Eventually I learned that the world was scarier than anything the Evil Eye could manifest…”

TITLE—Within These Wicked Walls

AUTHOR—Lauren Blackwood

PUBLISHED—November 2021 (read as an eARC from NetGalley)

GENRE—YA fantasy; retelling

SETTING—a haunted castle in the desert of Ethiopia

MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—haunted castle, possession, childhood trauma, Coptic Christianity, romance/love, found family

WRITING STYLE—⭐️⭐️⭐️—typical YA style but funnier than most 😂; very strong Mexican Gothic vibes too!

CHARACTERS—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

PLOT—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

BONUS ELEMENT/S—I loved the inspiration drawn from Coptic Christianity in this story and the religiousness of the MC felt really natural and unforced and it was nice to see a Christian represented in a story with none of the religiousness-related flaws—which is similar to Jane Eyre, but I felt that Jane’s religiousness felt a bit forced and came across as moralizing which Andromeda’s never did.

PHILOSOPHY—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

This book was a really cute and interesting retelling of Jane Eyre. I think the author did a great job of reimagining the main themes as well as the characters from the original while putting a completely different spin on the plot of her retelling. In particular I loved how she mirrored the banter between Mr. R. and Jane in the interactions between Magnus and Andromeda and I actually thought her banter was funnier and more clever—their conversations were some of my favorite parts of the book for sure.

Something I thought was interesting, and may have just been a projection of my own interpretation / opinion of Jane Eyre, was that I think Blackwood split the character of Mr. R. into two characters—Magnus and his father—and all the positive qualities of Mr. R. were in Magnus, while the villainous tendencies (i.e. Mr. R.’s treatment towards Bertha—who I think was supposed to be [REDACTED SPOILER] in this book) were attributed to his father. I actually really liked that and think it worked very well to address the problematic aspects of the original book.

But you definitely don’t need to have read Jane Eyre to read this book though—this book works perfectly well as its own fantasy novel. The magic system was really interesting and I loved Blackwood’s use of Coptic Christianity and the Ethiopian setting as the foundations for her worldbuilding—especially the reimagining of silver Coptic crosses as magical amulets—which is actually what they kind of are in real life so that overlap is really cool.

The second half of the book felt a bit sluggish to me though and I had trouble with the pacing of some of the events but the ending was excellent and I love how everything wrapped up. I would definitely read another book by Blackwood, especially if she continues with more retellings!

“But there was nothing to fear here . . . only memories. Those could only hurt you if you let them.”

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

TW // blood, gore, scary supernatural events, childhood trauma, homelessness,

Further Reading—

Mexican Gothic, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
the Dead Djinn series, by P. Djèlí Clark
The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson

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