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A review by coopercassady
Rawblood by Catriona Ward
3.0
I first heard of Catriona Ward when Stephen King provided a quote for Last House on Needless Street. He's one of my all time favourite authors and I was excited by the premise of that book, though at the time it was several months from release.
So in the meantime I added Rawblood and Little Eve to my "Want to Read" list and went on my way.
I went in with reasonably high expectations, I think, and the book was harder to read than I expected. With different chapters being told from different perspectives over the course of 100 years or so of the life of the Villarcas family, I found that the chapters from Iris' perspective were my favourite, while much of the first half of the book is told in the form of diary entries from Charles Danforth. These chapters were tough to get through, long and rambling and many times the character himself was not especially likeable, I found my mind sometimes drifting in particularly long passages of his.
I am glad, however, that I powered through these sometimes tedious chapters because other characters and stories and lives leapt off the pages.
What followed was the tragic and haunting story of Iris, and of the generations of women that came before her as she first rebels against the idea of her family curse before finally accepting the truth under tragic circumstances. Iris' story is heartbreaking, and unjust and has just enough truly masterful aspects of gothic horror that when I finished the book in the late hours, I lay in bed trying to sleep and was picturing the white lady over my shoulder.
This could easily have been a 4 or a 5 star review, but for the tediousness of some of the chapters, and some truly disturbing scenes of animal cruelty that left a bad taste in my mouth and I felt didn't really offer anything to the story.
That being said, I will definitely be checking out Last House, I can only imagine the growth in Ward's evocative writing style between her debut and third novels
So in the meantime I added Rawblood and Little Eve to my "Want to Read" list and went on my way.
I went in with reasonably high expectations, I think, and the book was harder to read than I expected. With different chapters being told from different perspectives over the course of 100 years or so of the life of the Villarcas family, I found that the chapters from Iris' perspective were my favourite, while much of the first half of the book is told in the form of diary entries from Charles Danforth. These chapters were tough to get through, long and rambling and many times the character himself was not especially likeable, I found my mind sometimes drifting in particularly long passages of his.
I am glad, however, that I powered through these sometimes tedious chapters because other characters and stories and lives leapt off the pages.
What followed was the tragic and haunting story of Iris, and of the generations of women that came before her as she first rebels against the idea of her family curse before finally accepting the truth under tragic circumstances. Iris' story is heartbreaking, and unjust and has just enough truly masterful aspects of gothic horror that when I finished the book in the late hours, I lay in bed trying to sleep and was picturing the white lady over my shoulder.
This could easily have been a 4 or a 5 star review, but for the tediousness of some of the chapters, and some truly disturbing scenes of animal cruelty that left a bad taste in my mouth and I felt didn't really offer anything to the story.
That being said, I will definitely be checking out Last House, I can only imagine the growth in Ward's evocative writing style between her debut and third novels