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A review by michael_benavidez
Solita: A Gothic Romance by Vivien Rainn
5.0
A modern gothic romance set in the Philippines.
Fun fact about my love for gothic stories: for all the love of them, I always felt that the cold, dreary, blue-grey tinted style of the story could get stale. There's something about the missing sweat, the constricting and claustrophobic heat of a summer that's just adds another layer on top of the mysteries and horrors going on.
Solita FUCKING NAILS THIS.
Everyone knows I'm in love with prose, with how one uses style to create the essence they want. Rainn's is an exercise in poetic imagery, giving vivid descriptions that not only show us the actions that Sadie is going through, but also feeling every ounce of emotion that fills her.
There's so much evoking of passions in this book, namely surrounding grief and the way it manifests. Being locked into Sadie's POV creates this attachment, a sense of living in this time stalled loop of simply existing around people that don't seem to get it. Or don't want to. She does such an amazing job of this, between side characters with small parts to the larger supporting cast, that the moments Sadie does allow vulnerability, I felt my heart break.
The romance in this is also something that caught me by surprise. While I don't remember any explicitly spicy scenes, I FEEL like there were. The energy between them is strong, it's evocative, it's something I've not really read before? And maybe that's due to not having read beyond my usual genres, but catching it here, had me enthralled.
The plot moves briskly, never feeling to stall. Even the moments where we linger in the doom and gloom of Sadie's crisis, the words move across the page with such poetic elegance.
I do think it's also important to note that this book broke my reading slump. After having tried three other novels, some mainstream works, even an attempt at reading King, this was the one that made me fall in love with the story so much that I read the first hundred pages in a night.
Fun fact about my love for gothic stories: for all the love of them, I always felt that the cold, dreary, blue-grey tinted style of the story could get stale. There's something about the missing sweat, the constricting and claustrophobic heat of a summer that's just adds another layer on top of the mysteries and horrors going on.
Solita FUCKING NAILS THIS.
Everyone knows I'm in love with prose, with how one uses style to create the essence they want. Rainn's is an exercise in poetic imagery, giving vivid descriptions that not only show us the actions that Sadie is going through, but also feeling every ounce of emotion that fills her.
There's so much evoking of passions in this book, namely surrounding grief and the way it manifests. Being locked into Sadie's POV creates this attachment, a sense of living in this time stalled loop of simply existing around people that don't seem to get it. Or don't want to. She does such an amazing job of this, between side characters with small parts to the larger supporting cast, that the moments Sadie does allow vulnerability, I felt my heart break.
The romance in this is also something that caught me by surprise. While I don't remember any explicitly spicy scenes, I FEEL like there were. The energy between them is strong, it's evocative, it's something I've not really read before? And maybe that's due to not having read beyond my usual genres, but catching it here, had me enthralled.
The plot moves briskly, never feeling to stall. Even the moments where we linger in the doom and gloom of Sadie's crisis, the words move across the page with such poetic elegance.
I do think it's also important to note that this book broke my reading slump. After having tried three other novels, some mainstream works, even an attempt at reading King, this was the one that made me fall in love with the story so much that I read the first hundred pages in a night.