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3.29 AVERAGE
3.29 AVERAGE
dark
emotional
mysterious
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
dark
emotional
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
An accountant arranges to have an arranged marriage with a doctor. Their arrangement rules: this is to be a business relationship, she will tend to his books and finances and live separate from him, they will only consummate their marriage to meet the legal requirements, they are to live separate lives essentially. Jane wants a marriage where she does not have to have a romantic relationship and Dr. Augustine Lawrence fits her bill since he is a man who is known to live in a separate home and is shy and handsome. Within about a day of meeting him ( and offering this arrangement, to which he profusely rejects, she strong arms her way into spending time with him to convince him to say yes) and she basically falls in love with him after a day. Augustine warns her that if they are to be married she must understand that this is strictly a business arrangement and she can never stay over at his family home....in which she strong arms her way into doing that after their wedding. Jane essentially goes back on her entire arrangement and is determined to be in love with him and stay at his home. He warns her that his home is not for her and that it is a messed up place.... but she stays. Soon she discovers that he has more secrets and that the house is haunted.
*Thanks Netgalley and St. Martin's Press for sending me an arc in exchange for an honest review*
Spoiler
Here we go: she starts snooping around his house and gets mad at him because he isn’t what she thought of him (mam you married him after meeting him once and basically said yes to everything despite not knowing him, and she feels “ betrayed” and that “he lied to her” yet her attitude coming into the marriage was that this was a business arrangement and she didn’t care. He continuously tries to get her to leave his house but she refuses and then she finds out he had a previous wife named Elodie who had died and now she is even more pissed, and when she confronts him saying he betrayed her he literally says “is it betrayal? or is it jealousy, this fury over Elodie? because you do not own this part of me. I did not offer it in the bargain” and then she goes on to find out that Augustine tried to bring his dead wife back to life by using ritual magic and essentially desecrating her dead body, which it failed and now he is cursed to be haunted by the dead and now jane is seeing Elodie everywhere in the house. Her great idea is to then perform said ritual herself to solve this issue because her stance is “ I can’t leave this guy i am so in love with. He needs fixing and I can fix him” and they both do cocaine and then they both die and then she goes sees some ghosts, goes through the ritual, and tadaahh she comes back from the dead and brings him back too and they live happily ever after.”*Thanks Netgalley and St. Martin's Press for sending me an arc in exchange for an honest review*
This started out strong. Great atmosphere and setup. A fantastic gothic house. But the slow devolution of the mental state of the main character echoed my devolution of understanding of what was going on. In the end, I think this aimed too high concept and didn't quite bring it together coherently. But figuring it out via the audiobook did keep me engaged during a long drive, and there certainly was a lot of interesting things happening.
dark
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This book just didn't do it for me. Despite a promising premise, it was very easy to put down and grew increasingly hard to follow as the mystery progressed. There were some very horrific descriptions, but in a way that almost felt like it was written for a script. Like, I kept picturing how these scene descriptions would be used by a CGI designer rather than feeling immersed in the horror.
It was hard to tell if we had an unreliable narrator, which made it hard to know how much to believe anything, and not in a fun, mysterious way but in a "what the fuck is actually happening" way. It ultimately dives into pages and pages of all of which I found extremely hard to follow and with minimal payoff.
There were some strong bones (no pun intended) to this story, but it just felt overwrought, and the author's acknowledgement page even mentions that she spent five years reworking this and making it more and more strange.
You can see the author has been influenced by some of the more notable gothic horror books, there were shades of The Woman in Black, The Haunting of Hill House, even some of The Yellow Wallpaper. Also elements of The Secret History. It just didn't work, at least not for me.
Not sure who I'd recommend this to. Feel like the reader for this book would need to be very interested in horror, magic, math, comfortable with sitting in a space of not knowing what is or isn't real for the majority of the book, and okay if all of those come in a package that is less than satisfying and in some ways felt like a creative writing student's best effort that has been reworked several times.
It was hard to tell if we had an unreliable narrator, which made it hard to know how much to believe anything, and not in a fun, mysterious way but in a "what the fuck is actually happening" way. It ultimately dives into pages and pages of
Spoiler
magic spells mixed with math equations and then for some miserable reason, much like Chamber of Secrets, we have to go back and revisit everything that already happened as viewed from someone from the future revisiting past events,There were some strong bones (no pun intended) to this story, but it just felt overwrought, and the author's acknowledgement page even mentions that she spent five years reworking this and making it more and more strange.
You can see the author has been influenced by some of the more notable gothic horror books, there were shades of The Woman in Black, The Haunting of Hill House, even some of The Yellow Wallpaper. Also elements of The Secret History. It just didn't work, at least not for me.
Not sure who I'd recommend this to. Feel like the reader for this book would need to be very interested in horror, magic, math, comfortable with sitting in a space of not knowing what is or isn't real for the majority of the book, and okay if all of those come in a package that is less than satisfying and in some ways felt like a creative writing student's best effort that has been reworked several times.
challenging
dark
emotional
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Jane strikes a deal with the local doctor: they will get married and Jane will be the doctor’s accountant, a job Jane is perfectly suited for. This will allow her to remain in town and live a relatively independent life. The only condition is that Jane must never go to his manor, especially at night. By accident, she does and finds her genteel and kind husband transformed into a paranoid anxious mess who sees things. So begins Jane’s journey into dark magic, ghosts, and fear.
Slow burn. It had promise, but ultimately kind of boring. I didn’t understand Jane’s loyalty to her husband who she hasn’t known long. It didn’t make sense. There was so much detail in the description that it felt bogged down. Although it did create a very vivid sense of place and chilling atmosphere. But it was anticlimactic and I was ready for the book to be over about ¾ of the way through. The connection between ritual, magic, and math was interesting. Similar to Starling’s first book, the protagonist spent a lot of time alone. In The Luminous Dead, it works, but in this it was tedious and the story just went in circles (ironic or intention given the circle imagery in the book?).
Slow burn. It had promise, but ultimately kind of boring. I didn’t understand Jane’s loyalty to her husband who she hasn’t known long. It didn’t make sense. There was so much detail in the description that it felt bogged down. Although it did create a very vivid sense of place and chilling atmosphere. But it was anticlimactic and I was ready for the book to be over about ¾ of the way through. The connection between ritual, magic, and math was interesting. Similar to Starling’s first book, the protagonist spent a lot of time alone. In The Luminous Dead, it works, but in this it was tedious and the story just went in circles (ironic or intention given the circle imagery in the book?).
Did I know what was happening? No. Did I absolutely love it and enjoy myself? Yes. Enjoyed the insanity and the ambiguous ending!
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
tense
slow-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:
No