A review by stbyleth
The Death of Jane Lawrence by Caitlin Starling

dark emotional mysterious tense fast-paced
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

I enjoyed this book overall, I think. The prose was extremely well-written and the author did her research into the time period. I had started off with the audiobook and found it was not going as fast as I wanted (even though the audiobook was EXTREMELY well acted and well worth it), so I ended up buying a copy since I can read faster than listen. 

I was put off by the magic at first but after suspending my disbelief it made sense in the narrative. That's what I get for not fully reading the summary. 

The pacing is rather fast. Jane falls in love with Augustine and he, with her, in a matter of a week. I suppose that's par for the course for these types of novels but I think it would have been better if it had leaned more into her wanting to keep it a business relationship strictly (him falling in love with her, however, would still make sense to me; he is very controlled by his emotions, whereas she is very logical and cunning). 

Rest of the review is spoilers. 

"Chapter Zero" was odd, to me. Somehow I still hoped that Elodie was the real Elodie (I was guessing that Jane would offer up her life so that Elodie could live as Jane or perhaps they mix together, and that was what the title meant (the death of the "true" Jane)). I had assumed the rest of the ghosts were not who they said they were from the start, and it only became more apparent when it was shown that Augustine and Jane saw different things out of the same shadows. But the time travel plot seemed very... off, in a way. Perhaps that was the intention. It certainly pulled the narrative together but that was it. I will say, though, that the author was good at giving small hints that, upon looking back, make more sense knowing what we know now. Also, for the longest time, I assumed that it would actually not be any ghosts whatsoever and that there was actually a gas leak of some sort since there was a LOT of focus on the house being piped with gas. But then nothing came of it.


I think it would have been more fun if the concept of the mirror world was played with more. When "Elodie" showed up in the mirror I got excited because for some time I had been thinking that this was a mirrored version of our world, with some key differences, like the names of the locations and outcome of the war. I still don't know why it was set in an alternate reality if this was not the case.


Overall, good book that could have used some fine tuning, but I still think it was worth it. 
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