Reviews with content warning for Homophobia - Spitting Gold

Set in Paris during the mid-to-late 19th century, we experience love, vengeance and redemption through the eyes of two estranged spiritist sisters. There is Sherlockian mystery combined with Shakespearean tragedy and all the tropes of the Victorian era.

The character development is on point, you care deeply about the focal ladies and their grande plights (with a side of sapphic wooing and cooing that is delightfully coquettish). The settings are portrayed in such detail that they play out during the reading experience as if watching a compelling mind-movie. While more Parisian flair could have possibly added to the book’s supernatural mystique, in all, Spitting Gold is easily a highly recommended novel full of heart-pounding suspense and heart-breaking emotion!

Much appreciation goes out to author, Carmella Lowkis, and Atria Books (Simon & Schuster) for the opportunity to experience Spitting Gold in advance of its May 14th, 2024 release.

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jamielianne's review against another edition

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dark mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.5

Spitting Gold tells the story of two sisters who pose as spirit mediums and their next mark, a family being haunted by an ancestor. The first half was creepy and atmospheric, and I genuinely had chills down my spine.

However, at the midway point, we have a POV change that details what led to this point and the ultimate outcome. It feels like a complete tonal shift away and I found myself skimming to the end. I absolutely adored the beginning so the ending felt unearned and rushed.

Don't get me wrong, the antagonist gets what they deserve at the end, but the epilogue felt like it was trying to wrap up the storyline, rather than deal with the fallout. Maybe an extra chapter or so could help alleviate the abruptness.

Thank you to the publisher and Net Galley for an advanced copy for review purposes. All opinions expressed are my own.

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tonyaf's review

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dark mysterious 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

4.25

Spitting Gold by Carmella Lowkis was such a pleasant surprise for me! It’s a mystery, historical fiction, and family drama with captivating characters and complex relationships.

The story is set in 1866 in France and is about two sisters, Sylvie and Charlotte, who formerly worked as fraudulent mediums and conned wealthy families out of money. The job was part of their family business built by their mother, who has since passed, and their father who is currently very ill. The father’s illness reunites the sisters for one last con, but this new job sets off a string of events that leads to wide-ranging consequences.

Both sisters are complex characters and have complicated feelings towards each other. The story references Charles Perrault’s The Fairies throughout. The Fairies tells the story of one good sister and one bad sister. Spitting Gold argues that the story would be far more nuanced than that. All stories have more than one side. Sylvie and Charlotte are both the good sisters and the bad sisters. They love each other dearly but also harbor anger and resentment. They both make decisions that both hurt and help the other. They are both doing their best in the world they are living in. This complexity makes for such a riveting story!

While the sisters and their relationship is the star of Spitting Gold, I also loved the mystery plot and the cast of side characters. There’s also a sweet Sapphic love story entwined (and a few other delightful queer characters too).

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camillessi's review

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dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated

3.75

((More coherent review to come closer to publication date. E-galley received through Edelweiss.))

This was an enjoyable gothic read that was a breeze to get through. The tension stayed consistent, making me want to read more, without feeling overbearing. However, because the comparison to Sarah Waters is what caught my eye in the beginning, I found myself a little more critical than I might have been otherwise.

The prose flowed well, but sometimes felt inconsistent. Sometimes it would be drawn-out and flowery, or feeling very of-the-era. Other times, it would read quite modern and simple. Neither is bad, but the inconsistency sometimes drew me out of the story.

The characters also fell a little flat for me. I could see and understand what the story was trying to do with the two sisters, but I never felt like I could hold on to one thing about them. I wasn't always convinced by what we were being told about them—possibly because much of the time, we were being told things about them rather than seeing it.

But all in all, this book was exactly what it said on the tin: a twisty gothic historical novel with a sapphic romance. I would recommend it for readers of Penner & Waters, but perhaps more for the basics of the story, and not necessarily the writing style. I'm also happy to have another historical sapphic novel to add to the slowly-growing list.

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ardentlyelle's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

Spitting Gold by Carmella Lowkis is a book about family, chosen and blood and the strength of each. It’s about greed and the way it changes people. It’s about ghosts and fairy tales and the people who tell those stories. It’s about sisters, and love, and all the ways that love can look and feel and be.

The story is told in first person, and while I typically prefer more escapism in my fiction, the insight we get into Sylvie and Florence because of this point of view is integral to the story. The first half of the novel is told from the older sister’s perspective, and the second half from the younger. While there is some overlap, the author does a great job at not making us sit through the same dialogue again - there is a whole second story happening that we get access to when the POV switches.

I found myself more compelled by the queer sister’s story, of the two, but that has less to do with the writing and more with my personal preferences in books. Both sisters were captivating, and by the time I was 60% through the book, it consumed my every thought, and I didn’t want to put it down.

The relationship between the sisters is one of the best I’ve read. The miscommunication and inability to see past their own experiences, a trope so often used to spice up a romance novel, makes Sylvie and Charlotte feel like real people. They are fleshed-out and flawed, they are passionate and angry, they love each other so much and they are so, so hurt by each other. It’s family, and it’s real.

The ending destroyed me, as all good endings do. I loved this book beginning to end, and I hope this review helps other readers to find it and love it, too.

Content warnings: Family death, domestic abuse, suicide, homophobia. Nothing particularly graphic, although the domestic abuse has brief heavy moments.

Thank you to Atria Books and NetGalley for the eARC in exchange for my honest review.

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malily8312's review against another edition

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dark emotional mysterious slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

Spitting gold is a difficult book to rate for me. We begin our story with Sylvie, the good girl who got out of the slums, married rich, and never wants to go back. She is convinced by her sister, Charlotte, to return for one last con, returning to the world of faking spirit medium powers to scam money from the grieving. However she finds herself out of her depth as she begins to realize that many of the events surrounding the haunting she is meant to be fabricating don’t have easy answers.

Sylvie is our point of view character for nearly half this book, and every moment stuck in her head was unbearable. She was primarily concerned with her marriage (which we had never seen when it was good, so I did not particularly care when it started to go bad) and judging her sister. She is selfish and vain and illogical. Also her story dragged, focusing on characters we had no reason to like rather than the interesting elements of the plot: namely the spirit mediums and their gothically tragic clients.

If we had not switched perspectives to Charlotte halfway through the book, I would not have finished it. As it was, not knowing that that perspective change was coming, I very nearly didn’t get to it.

When we finally do shift perspectives halfway through, the book became leaps and bounds better. The writing was strong throughout, and in this second half it became apparent that Sylvie’s character flaws were deliberate, a set up so we could better understand her dynamic and role in Charlotte’s story. Had the entire thing been from Charlotte’s perspective, this would have been a 4-4.5 start book.

With the new point of view character, this becomes a beautiful story about family bonds, betrayal, love, and loyalty. We gain new insights into the mystery of the family Sylvie and Charlotte are conning (which had always been intriguing, but took up too little of Sylvies story), and into how the girls grew up together. We begin to understand the fractious bonds of these two sisters, informed by our unpleasant time in Sylvies head, but fleshed out and given dimension by our time in Charlotte’s. I cared about Charlotte and the people populating her world in a way I’d never had the chance to with Sylvie.

I think I understand what this book was going for. It was meant to lure us in with Sylvies perspective, set us up to believe her since she was our narrator. We were meant to sympathize with Sylvie, thé good sister, who maybe wasn’t perfect but tried to do what was right while her ungrateful and unsympathetic sister blamed her for falling in love and leaving. Then when we flip to Charlotte’s perspective, we’re shown that we had a biased picture and realize that everything was always more complicated than that. This is spoiled by two things. The first is that the ‘foreshadowing’ during Sylvies section, in other words the indications that she wasn’t actually the perfect sister, were so heavy handed as to make it painfully obvious that Sylvie kinda sucked. The second was that it was not clear that we would be changing perspectives at all, meaning it very much seemed that we would be stuck with an uninteresting, unsympathetic, nearly unbearable narrator for the entire story, and that her world view was the one we were meant to accept.

This book has a lot of potential, and once I got to the halfway mark it became a really good read. However I did not enjoy getting there.

Arc provided by Atria books via NETGALLEY in exchange for an honest review

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