Reviews - Little Eve | The StoryGraph

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Dark and monstrous, as I have come to expect from Ward! She captures human anguish and fragility and tenderness, alongside cruelty and violence and darkness, incredibly well. I see some reviews calling this gothic horror, but it felt more like folk-horror to me. I enjoyed everything about this book. The characters were wonderful, complicated, untrustworthy, messy, and relatable. No one was simple or underwritten, everyone felt (sometimes painfully) real. The writing and pacing were quite skilled. The story jumps between time periods, but not in a tricky or manipulative way, with each chapter title announcing what year it took place in, and this was a great device for this story. It allowed the story, along with expectations and ideas, to grow and swell and then crash against the shore as each new bit of information challenged what you thought you knew. The story, and the heartbreak of the story, is wonderful. Very dark, dealing with intense violence and trauma visited upon children, some of it explicit, but it never felt like it was being shocking for the sake of it, everything fit together really well. The ideas of family and faith and truth and identity are all wrapped up together as this story digs into you, like a knife slowly piercing the skin. There is a mystery element to the story, and having read two other novels by Ward I was able to guess a lot of the ending reveals before they happened, but that didn’t make the journey less enjoyable. Also, they weren’t telegraphed in any painful or obvious way, the story was incredibly tight and a joy to read, it never felt like it was plodding along or wasting time. It is simply a familiarity with the depths of emotional twists that Ward has shown in other novels that let me guess what might be happening.

I know this was actually Ward’s second novel, written before “The Last House on Needless Street” or “Sundial,” even though it is being newly published after those novels in the USA. It doesn’t feel sophomoric, though. It feels like an author in command of her voice and the story she wants to tell, even if that story is darkened by pain and despair. Although the subject matter was a little heavy, it was a delight to read, and it sped along. I didn’t want to put it down once I started, it was well-paced and enticing and shows that Ward really has a strong command of her craft.

I want to thank NetGalley and Macmillan-Tor/Forge, Tor Nightfirewho provided a complimentary eARC in exchange for an honest review.