Scan barcode
lennybelardo's review against another edition
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
i read this because i wanted to read something else by lauren james after i read an unauthorised fan treatise and she mentioned harriet stoker in a Q&A about treatise. her mention was in the context of plot twists and she said harriet stoker had a big one, and i'm the kind of person who hears about a plot twist in something and desperately needs to find out what it is. i had a lot of faith in james because i really liked treatise and i respected that the plot twists were engaging while also having been clearly signalled in the previous writing, rather than things coming entirely out of left field. all that being said, i'm a grown adult and this is demonstrably YA fiction, so i probably would've just read the wiki on this if it had had a plot summary to see what the twist was. it didn't have a wiki, so i read the book.
up front: i was absolutely not the target audience for this book. it's extremely YA and written in a way that was not resonating with me personally. cool concept, interesting plot, but the writing was super thin - and i understand that this is a feature of the target audience in many ways, but i still think you can write interesting prose for a YA audience. it really stood out as Not Good Writing to me in the final fight towards the end, where everything was really complicated and it seemed like she sort of gave up on trying to be interesting in her prose to get across the complexity of the setpieces and everyone's actions. it was straight up awful when a big twist moment happened in the fight and the next section was written in pluperfect tense (i.e. "she had run, she had thought") for the entire section to bring us up to speed on what another character was doing while the main thing happened. really not good, very jarring to read. another thing that i understand was part of the YA targeting but that i found slightly unbearable was how clear she made everything in the narrative. characters come to realisations about things and spell it out so transparently in the prose, like "harriet realised she had done this thing because [reason that was already super clear to me as a reader]". like, yeah, i know. it started to feel like the author didn't have faith in her readers to understand what point she was making and what the "moral" of it all was. AGAIN, i know she did this because she is writing to a YA audience, but i think you can trust a YA audience to understand these things without spelling them out so clearly. the bartimaeus books by jonathan stroud are a great example of this.
some other thoughts, less well-formed:
up front: i was absolutely not the target audience for this book. it's extremely YA and written in a way that was not resonating with me personally. cool concept, interesting plot, but the writing was super thin - and i understand that this is a feature of the target audience in many ways, but i still think you can write interesting prose for a YA audience. it really stood out as Not Good Writing to me in the final fight towards the end, where everything was really complicated and it seemed like she sort of gave up on trying to be interesting in her prose to get across the complexity of the setpieces and everyone's actions. it was straight up awful when a big twist moment happened in the fight and the next section was written in pluperfect tense (i.e. "she had run, she had thought") for the entire section to bring us up to speed on what another character was doing while the main thing happened. really not good, very jarring to read. another thing that i understand was part of the YA targeting but that i found slightly unbearable was how clear she made everything in the narrative. characters come to realisations about things and spell it out so transparently in the prose, like "harriet realised she had done this thing because [reason that was already super clear to me as a reader]". like, yeah, i know. it started to feel like the author didn't have faith in her readers to understand what point she was making and what the "moral" of it all was. AGAIN, i know she did this because she is writing to a YA audience, but i think you can trust a YA audience to understand these things without spelling them out so clearly. the bartimaeus books by jonathan stroud are a great example of this.
some other thoughts, less well-formed:
- the setting was interesting in theory but very thinly described. i had a vague understanding of how the building was laid out, but we didn't actually get much in terms of what it looked like, what style of building it was, what the rooms were laid out like, etc.
- the plot twist was SO FUCKING COMPLICATED holy shit. the plot itself was super complex, i think maybe too complex, especially because on top of all that we're trying to figure out characters and how they feel about things and there are those inter-chapter things in italics written by
claudia the baby , as it turns out. i think a lot of the smaller twists were well-seeded (i figured out the last one before it was revealed, which felt very satisfying because it was a very clear process of elimination that made me feel like i had picked up everything she was putting down), but the stuff towards the end withharriet's grandma being a reincarnation of leah's disintegrated evil husband and leah being a 2000-year-old ghost teen mother from roman times who was actually a celt who was kidnapped by romans and the tricksters were her brothers in law and also claudia can time travel and steal ghost energy from the past to use in the future was... honestly so much to take in. i did find myself whispering"oh my god, she's not harriet's grandma" aloud in excited horror whennorma showed up acting weird, but it was just all so fucking complicated and i think that took away from the satisfaction of these twists. i also think that these big twists were not as well-seeded as the smaller ones. harriet's grandma was like, truly cartoonishly evil. honestly, all the tricksters were, to a degree that was a little bit jarring, but especially the person i just mentioned. like,poisoning three people?? BEFORE you even realised you were a reincarnated evil roman centurion or whatever?? girl. on the subject of this character,i thought the author was going with a 'munchausen by proxy that went too far' thing, which honestly would have made more sense rather than her intentionally killing people because they stopped doing what she said, and it also fit better into the fact that she broke her ankle (or lied about breaking her ankle) to get harriet to stay at home... but instead she was just an abuser who killed people when they started to disobey her. that's what was cartoonish to me. - the stuff with kasper and felix made me cringe extremely hard. i didn't care for it as a side plot, it was saccharine as hell, and there was a moment after kasper's interaction with the tricksters where i literally groaned aloud because it felt so virtue signal-y –
when felix realised the tricksters had taken kasper's fear and he says "you're not in a place to consent so we can never be together" or something?? aurghgh. cringe! also when kasper got his fear back after the tricksters got disintegrated so they could just be together again, i thought that was a slightly wobbly tie-up to the kasper/felix thing because my understanding of it was that rufus/vini (whichever one eats emotions) was converting those emotions to energy, so surely the emotions would be gone forever after he eats them, and i don't understand why him disintegrating would have given everyone their emotions back. - really liked the reveal of harriet's actual power. that was very good and fitting.
- the way the powers were written was often confusing and fairly bland. i went into this further up there about the final fight being clunky and badly written, but the powers in general were kind of confusing.
- just going to spoiler tag this whole thing because i'm lazy:
one thing that irritates me about the writing of the characters is that james makes it clear that claudia the baby clearly has the intelligence of an adult human because she is extremely old and her intelligent thoughts are trapped inside her adult mind. however, the main friendship group who died in 1994 (rima, kasper and felix) seem to have never really grown up, despite having been dead for almost thirty years. they still act like teenagers. it's weird. why does the baby have to have such a miserable existence with the awareness of an adult and the inability to express herself, but rima and kasper and felix are trapped in amber in their teenage mindsets? - SOME OF THE BODY HORROR IN THIS BOOK WAS WILD. i think this is why i feel that the writing was lacking despite clearly being YA, because it appears to be targeted to younger readers in the YA bracket with the writing being so straightforward, but HARRIET'S EYELID? HELLO?? and the fact that she just has to walk around for the rest of her ghostly life with
a literal broken neck that she has to straighten by wrapping a scarf around it so her head doesn't flop over? what on EARTH.
i have a lot more small thoughts but i'm literally only writing this for myself so that years down the line when i'm checking books i've read and i see this book and i'm like "what the hell why did i read THAT", i can read this and check. so. peace out
Content Warnings
Graphic: Body horror
anniereads221's review against another edition
challenging
dark
mysterious
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
4.0
I did not like Harriet. But the other characters were way better to me. But i also enjoyed the plot twists. Because uptil half way i was like this is 3 stars at the most. But that last part really sold it for me. Definitely not a book for everyone in my opinion. It is so slow before stuff happens. Harriet is very unlikable. But the way stuff all ended up making sense and made my brain itch in a really good way. So 4 stars it is.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Grief, Murder, Animal death, Animal cruelty, Emotional abuse, Injury/Injury detail, Sexism, Death, Child abuse, Torture, Body horror, Violence, and Bullying
cerilouisereads's review
dark
emotional
funny
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
Content Warnings
Graphic: Blood, Body horror, Bullying, Death, Death of parent, Domestic abuse, Emotional abuse, Gaslighting, Injury/Injury detail, and Murder
Moderate: Animal death, Drug use, Suicide, and Suicide attempt
calaqua's review
dark
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Blood, and Body horror
Moderate: Child abuse, Domestic abuse, Emotional abuse, Physical abuse, Torture, and Violence
rainbowshelves's review
adventurous
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
4.5
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death
Moderate: Panic attacks/disorders, Toxic relationship, Body horror, Blood, and Violence
Minor: Animal death, Mental illness, Torture, and Suicide
More...