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A review by littlepiscesreading
What Happened at Hawthorne House by Hadassah Shiradski
dark
2.0
The prose is straightforward but not undescriptive. I like the little details that give you a quick insight into each of the girls– Sophie’s ‘little huff'. And this goes for the narrative more broadly too. More subtle forms of realistic horror do tend to be less effective for me as a reader. It can take me some time to put the pieces together and by then it’s gone from subtle to over. Sometimes that’s intentional on the part of the author. Sometimes I’m oblivious. It was very effective here.
Rosalyn’s voice isn’t without character, and her feelings certainly bleed into the text. There is a matter-of-factness to the prose that I find lends itself well to the casual cruelty of the children. This is just what their lives are. This is just what they do. And that was utterly horrifying.
And then we find ourselves in the second part of the book. I still don’t know how to feel about it. I knew that the girls’ game would simmer over at some point and I sat there, breathless, as it did. It remained as gothic but there was a noticeable shift in the type of horror it portrayed. It felt like a change of genre. And by the end I felt like I had read two books, not one.
A pity. The first was brilliant. I thought the second would hone in on the idea of self-inflicted torment that I ached to read. It did. It both faded into the background and became more blatant, this time by having it outright stated more than once. The narration shifted too. It became more internal, more repetitive. ‘If Rosalyn remained, he thought it likely that the rest of the children did as well’ and ‘he highly doubted that only Rosalyn had remained’ are from the same paragraph.
There are interesting ideas in the second. I wish they had been executed well. However it opened a chasm that distanced the reader from the girls and undercut the mounting horror it had built to so effectively. On a formatting note, I use dark theme and the clover line breaks did not resemble clovers. A little more definition would have served the illustrations well.
Thanks to Book Sirens and Hadassah Shiradski for this review copy. I leave this review voluntarily.
Rosalyn’s voice isn’t without character, and her feelings certainly bleed into the text. There is a matter-of-factness to the prose that I find lends itself well to the casual cruelty of the children. This is just what their lives are. This is just what they do. And that was utterly horrifying.
And then we find ourselves in the second part of the book. I still don’t know how to feel about it. I knew that the girls’ game would simmer over at some point and I sat there, breathless, as it did. It remained as gothic but there was a noticeable shift in the type of horror it portrayed. It felt like a change of genre. And by the end I felt like I had read two books, not one.
A pity. The first was brilliant. I thought the second would hone in on the idea of self-inflicted torment that I ached to read. It did. It both faded into the background and became more blatant, this time by having it outright stated more than once. The narration shifted too. It became more internal, more repetitive. ‘If Rosalyn remained, he thought it likely that the rest of the children did as well’ and ‘he highly doubted that only Rosalyn had remained’ are from the same paragraph.
There are interesting ideas in the second. I wish they had been executed well. However it opened a chasm that distanced the reader from the girls and undercut the mounting horror it had built to so effectively. On a formatting note, I use dark theme and the clover line breaks did not resemble clovers. A little more definition would have served the illustrations well.
Thanks to Book Sirens and Hadassah Shiradski for this review copy. I leave this review voluntarily.