Starling House

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Synopsis

A grim and gothic new tale from author Alix E. Harrow about a small town haunted by secrets that can’t stay buried and the sinister house that sits at the crossroads of it all.

Eden, Kentucky, is just another dying, bad-luck town, known only for the legend of E. Starling, the reclusive nineteenth-century author and illustrator who wrote The Underland–and disappeared. Before she vanished, Starling House appeared. But everyone agrees that it’s best to let the uncanny house?and its last lonely heir, Arthur Starling?go to rot.

Opal knows better than to mess with haunted houses or brooding men, but an unexpected job offer might be a chance to get her brother out of Eden. Too quickly, though, Starling House starts to feel dangerously like something she’s never had: a home.

As sinister forces converge on Starling House, Opal and Arthur are going to have to make a dire choice to dig up the buried secrets of the past and confront their own fears, or let Eden be taken over by literal nightmares.

If Opal wants a home, she’ll have to fight for it.

Synopses source: Goodreads

What pattern is that?
Pictured with the book in the photo above is my Day & Night Bookmark, a free pattern here on the blog!

Review

Genre(s): Fiction, Paranormal, Mystery/Thriller, Horror
HB&W Rating: 3 stars
View on Goodreads, StoryGraph
Buy on Barnes & Noble, Amazon

I liked this book, but not as much as I wanted to like it. A scrappy young woman caring for her teen brother for years after they were both orphaned, a man determined to do what he thinks is right at his own expense, small town secrets, a house that’s alive, monsters that roam the mist invisible to all but a select few, flocks of birds and inexplicable occurrences, it should have made for one heck of a read, but it just didn’t really come together the way it should have.

This book was definitely a slow burn, and I admit to being bored through much of it, not really getting into it until the last 20% of the book. Still, as boring as I found it, it was relatively easy to keep flipping pages. The writing itself is what you would expect from Harrow: beautiful, prosaic at times, insightful, with a handful of passages that stood out.

There were several themes in the book but they either didn’t do enough to make the point or came too late to be meaningful. Found family, racism, class differences, small towns, prejudice, all some of the themes she was working toward that sadly fell short of the mark.

As a gothic paranormal mystery/thriller, I liked it but I’m not sure I’d recommend it.

Until next time,

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