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A review by eggcatsreads
The Graceview Patient by Caitlin Starling
4.5
Oppressive and filled with the feeling of the room closing in around you, of losing your ability to escape, of realizing the hopelessness of your situation - The Graceview Patient is another phenomenal read from Caitlin Starling.
With an unreliable narrator as our main character - often from the drugs of the experimental treatment given to her - we are never certain what is real and what is a hallucination inflicted. How much of what is going on is actually happening? Even when we get to the end of the novel, with the reveal and the understanding of what, exactly, is going on - we (as the reader) have the understanding that everything we’ve just experienced could be not real.
Told as if our main character is recollecting all the events that brought her to her current situation, we are given hints and clues about how everything ends for her - even while she is hopeful for the best in the current timeline. We are given little red flags about her isolation, her precarious situation, and the inability to trust those around her in the statements she makes about what is going on in her recollection. I loved these because it upped the eeriness of the novel, even when nothing is actually happening yet, because it primes us to look for the other shoe to drop before there’s even a shoe to drop. I also love how it sets us up to believe everything our main character experienced is actually happening as she’s describing it, and not the very likely possibility that much of this is a delusion created by the cocktail of experimental drugs she is being subjected to.
Filled with intense medical situations, I found this book personally hard to read at times. I do not like things like needles or surgeries or the like, and found those parts a bit difficult to read. However, while going into detail I never felt like this book went so far into the medical horror aspect that it was unbearable, unless your phobia is so intense that even discussing such things would be upsetting.
I loved this book and found the medical setting lending to a kind of hopelessness throughout the novel, as once the events truly begin to unfold our main character has absolutely no one to vouch for her. Anyone who is a fan of medical horror where you can’t trust your own memories or experiences, along with a trapped room/location where it begins to feel like the walls are closing in, would love this novel.
A huge thank you to the author, NetGalley, and St. Martin’s Press for providing this e-ARC.
With an unreliable narrator as our main character - often from the drugs of the experimental treatment given to her - we are never certain what is real and what is a hallucination inflicted. How much of what is going on is actually happening? Even when we get to the end of the novel, with the reveal and the understanding of what, exactly, is going on - we (as the reader) have the understanding that everything we’ve just experienced could be not real.
Told as if our main character is recollecting all the events that brought her to her current situation, we are given hints and clues about how everything ends for her - even while she is hopeful for the best in the current timeline. We are given little red flags about her isolation, her precarious situation, and the inability to trust those around her in the statements she makes about what is going on in her recollection. I loved these because it upped the eeriness of the novel, even when nothing is actually happening yet, because it primes us to look for the other shoe to drop before there’s even a shoe to drop. I also love how it sets us up to believe everything our main character experienced is actually happening as she’s describing it, and not the very likely possibility that much of this is a delusion created by the cocktail of experimental drugs she is being subjected to.
Filled with intense medical situations, I found this book personally hard to read at times. I do not like things like needles or surgeries or the like, and found those parts a bit difficult to read. However, while going into detail I never felt like this book went so far into the medical horror aspect that it was unbearable, unless your phobia is so intense that even discussing such things would be upsetting.
I loved this book and found the medical setting lending to a kind of hopelessness throughout the novel, as once the events truly begin to unfold our main character has absolutely no one to vouch for her. Anyone who is a fan of medical horror where you can’t trust your own memories or experiences, along with a trapped room/location where it begins to feel like the walls are closing in, would love this novel.
A huge thank you to the author, NetGalley, and St. Martin’s Press for providing this e-ARC.