Shelf Control #346: Black Rabbit Hall by Eve Chase

Posted in Shelf Control by Lisa @ Bookshelf Fantasies

Welcome to Shelf Control — an original feature created and hosted by Bookshelf Fantasies.

Shelf Control is a weekly celebration of the unread books on our shelves. Pick a book you own but haven’t read, write a post about it (suggestions: include what it’s about, why you want to read it, and when you got it), and link up! For more info on what Shelf Control is all about, check out my introductory post, here.

Want to join in? Shelf Control posts go up every Wednesday. See the guidelines at the bottom of the post, and jump on board!

Title: Black Rabbit Hall
Author: Eve Chase
Published: 2015
Length: 400 pages

What it’s about (synopsis via Goodreads):

For fans of Kate Morton and Sarah Waters, here’s a magnetic debut novel of wrenching family secrets, forbidden love, and heartbreaking loss housed within the grand gothic manor of Black Rabbit Hall.

Ghosts are everywhere, not just the ghost of Momma in the woods, but ghosts of us too, what we used to be like in those long summers …

Amber Alton knows that the hours pass differently at Black Rabbit Hall, her London family’s country estate, where no two clocks read the same. Summers there are perfect, timeless. Not much ever happens. Until, of course, it does.

More than three decades later, Lorna is determined to be married within the grand, ivy-covered walls of Pencraw Hall, known as Black Rabbit Hall among the locals. But as she’s drawn deeper into the overgrown grounds, half-buried memories of her mother begin to surface and Lorna soon finds herself ensnared within the manor’s labyrinthine history, overcome with an insatiable need for answers about her own past and that of the once-happy family whose memory still haunts the estate.

Stunning and atmospheric, this debut novel is a thrilling spiral into the hearts of two women separated by decades but inescapably linked by the dark and tangled secrets of Black Rabbit Hall.

How and when I got it:

I added the e-book to my library several years ago.

Why I want to read it:

I remember seeing promotional material for this book and thinking it looked good, and then saw it featured while browsing at the library and was drawn to the dark and mysterious cover. I didn’t actually borrow it at that time, but when I saw a Kindle deal for it, I grabbed it.

I’m intrigued by the synopsis. Why would the clocks always be different? What actually happened at Black Rabbit Hall? Why does it have a different name 30 years later, and what happened to the family who used to live there? So many riddles to untangle!

I do like grim, gothic stories, and nothing beats a decrepit old mansion with a secret past! I don’t know anyone who’s actually read this book, but I’m interested enough to want to hold on to it and finally give it a try.

What do you think? Would you read this book?

Please share your thoughts!

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10Dec2022

Book Review: The Dead Romantics by Ashley Poston

Posted in Book Reviews by Lisa @ Bookshelf Fantasies

Title: The Dead Romantics
Author: Ashley Poston
Publisher: Berkley
Publication date: June 28, 2022
Length: 366 pages
Genre: Contemporary fiction
Source: Purchased
Rating:

A disillusioned millennial ghostwriter who, quite literally, has some ghosts of her own, has to find her way back home in this sparkling adult debut from national bestselling author Ashley Poston.

Florence Day is the ghostwriter for one of the most prolific romance authors in the industry, and she has a problem—after a terrible breakup, she no longer believes in love. It’s as good as dead.

When her new editor, a too-handsome mountain of a man, won’t give her an extension on her book deadline, Florence prepares to kiss her career goodbye. But then she gets a phone call she never wanted to receive, and she must return home for the first time in a decade to help her family bury her beloved father.

For ten years, she’s run from the town that never understood her, and even though she misses the sound of a warm Southern night and her eccentric, loving family and their funeral parlor, she can’t bring herself to stay. Even with her father gone, it feels like nothing in this town has changed. And she hates it.

Until she finds a ghost standing at the funeral parlor’s front door, just as broad and infuriatingly handsome as ever, and he’s just as confused about why he’s there as she is.

Romance is most certainly dead . . . but so is her new editor, and his unfinished business will have her second-guessing everything she’s ever known about love stories.

This was a good one!

The plot synopsis is almost too complicated, but once you get into the story, the pieces fit. Basically, Florence is a ghostwriter for one of the most successful romance writers in the industry, but she’s behind on turning in the last book she has under contract. After a harsh betrayal and break-up a year earlier, she just can’t envision true love and happy endings any more. But the clock is ticking, and not finishing is really not an option.

Florence’s family owns the funeral home in a small southern town. She grew up with parents who were infuriatingly romantic and in love, and their home was filled with joy. Florence also has a secret — she sees dead people. Both she and her father have the gift of seeing and being able to interact with ghosts, but when this becomes public during Florence’s teens, she faces so much ridicule and bullying that she swears never to return to her hometown again.

Now an adult living in Manhattan, she’s stayed away for ten years, but is forced to go back and deal with the past when her father dies suddenly. Amidst the turmoil of family grief and planning a funeral, the ghost of Florence’s brand new editor shows up on her doorstep, which is especially concerning since she had no idea that he’d died.

Dead Romantics is a love story, but it’s so much more. It’s a loving depiction of a family that celebrates life and views death as just another part of the journey. It’s also a look at the internal life of a writer, and it’s a study of what it means to feel lost and hopeless and burdened by shattered illusions.

I love how Florence’s family is shown, and I love the rituals they invent and embrace to celebrate the life of a man who seems like the perfect husband and father. I also really enjoyed the strangeness of Florence getting to know the ghost of a man she’d only met once, and how their connection is able to develop and bridge the obvious gap between a living woman and a man who’s passed on.

I won’t give anything away… but I couldn’t see how there could be a solution to their situation that made sense.

There were no happily ever afters between an undertaker’s daughter and her ghost.

Surprise! The ending totally works, satisfied me, and left me feeling upbeat and cheery.

The writing is quite lovely, and having suffered a family loss recently myself, I found that certain passages really resonated:

I’d always written how grief was hollow. How it was a vast cavern of nothing. But I was wrong. Grief was the exact opposite. It was full and heavy and drowning because it wasn’t the absence of everything you lost—it was the culmination of it all, your love, your happiness, your bittersweets, wound tight like a knotted ball of yarn.

There’s a certain character who deserves to suffer some truly bad karma and I felt a little disappointed that we didn’t get to see that happen… but then again, that’s not what this story was really about.

Overall, I’m really glad that I picked up Dead Romantics and gave it a try. It was just the right mixture of sentiment, humor, sadness, and joy that I needed this week. Having read this author’s Once Upon a Con YA trilogy, I was curious to see how she’d do with her adult fiction debut. I’m happy to report that she nailed it!

5Dec2020

Book Review: Watch Over Me by Nina LaCour

Posted in Book Reviews by Lisa @ Bookshelf Fantasies

Title: Watch Over Me
Author: Nina LaCour
Publisher: Dutton Books for Young Readers
Publication date: September 15, 2020
Length: 272 pages
Genre: Young adult
Source: Purchased
Rating:

Nina LaCour delivers another emotional knockout with Watch Over Me, the eagerly anticipated follow-up to the Printz Award-winning We Are Okay.
Mila is used to being alone. Maybe that’s why she said yes to the opportunity: living in this remote place, among the flowers and the fog and the crash of waves far below.
But she hadn’t known about the ghosts.
Newly graduated from high school, Mila has aged out of the foster care system. So when she’s offered a job and a place to stay at a farm on an isolated part of the Northern California Coast, she immediately accepts. Maybe she will finally find a new home, a real home. The farm is a refuge, but also haunted by the past traumas its young residents have come to escape. And Mila’s own terrible memories are starting to rise to the surface.
Watch Over Me is another stunner from Printz Award-Winning author Nina LaCour, whose empathetic, lyrical prose is at the heart of this modern ghost story of resilience and rebirth.

This book was not what I was expecting. It’s so much more.

Watch Over Me is a gorgeously written story of survival, found families, and coming to peace with one’s past. It’s a story of suffering and recovery, of facing one’s fears and choosing a way forward.

Mila, at age eighteen, has finished high school, and after living with kind foster parents who are eager to start over with a new baby to care for, she needs a place to put down roots at the start of her life as a young adult. She’s thrilled to be offered a place at The Farm, a refuge run by a warm couple named Terry and Julia, who take in abandoned and hopeless children and give them a safe place to grow.

Mila will be one of three interns, young adults who teach school for the younger children and who work as part of the farm’s collective, cooking, cleaning, and taking the farm’s flowers and produce to the weekly farmers market. Meanwhile, she’ll be living in a small no-frills cabin heated by a wood-burning stove, sharing meals with the family in the big house, and participating in the simple, isolated life that the group enjoys, far from the nearest town.

Though she tries to fit in, Mila is constantly worried about her place. She has secrets from her past, and while she tries to reassure herself that she is good, she’s fearful that the family will turn her away if they know the truth about what she’s done. Still, she bonds quickly with Lee, the 9-year-old boy who she’ll be teaching. She recognizes that he’s been hurt in his past, and by sharing some of her own pain, she hopes to help him open up and start to be less afraid.

And one more thing: There are ghosts. Each night, shimmering ghostly children play on the fields of the farm, visible to all the farm’s residents. No one seems particularly freaked out by them — they’re just part of what makes the place unique.

As Mila settles in, memories of her past creep back in, slowly at first, then threatening to overwhelm her. The story of what she’s been through is horrible, and it quickly becomes clear that this is a girl who no one protected, and who was endangered by the person who should have put Mila’s safety first.

I won’t explain how the ghosts fit into the story, but the more I read, the more captivated I was by the farm, its people, and how Mila’s past comes to haunt her present. I loved the characters and the relationships, but most of all loved Mila, with her doubts and uncertainties and fears — but also because of her big heart and capacity for love, and how badly she needs a place to belong.

Watch Over Me is unsettling and beautiful, and I’m pretty sure I’ll want to go back to it and read it all over again, just to let it all sink in. Highly recommended.

19Feb2020

Shelf Control #205: Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss

Posted in Shelf Control by Lisa @ Bookshelf Fantasies

Welcome to Shelf Control — an original feature created and hosted by Bookshelf Fantasies.

Want to join in? Shelf Control posts go up every Wednesday. See the guidelines at the bottom of the post, and jump on board!

Title: Ghost Wall
Author: Sarah Moss
Published: 2019
Length: 144 pages

What it’s about (synopsis via Goodreads):

In the north of England, far from the intrusions of cities but not far from civilization, Silvie and her family are living as if they are ancient Britons, surviving by the tools and knowledge of the Iron Age.

For two weeks, the length of her father’s vacation, they join an anthropology course set to reenact life in simpler times. They are surrounded by forests of birch and rowan; they make stew from foraged roots and hunted rabbit. The students are fulfilling their coursework; Silvie’s father is fulfilling his lifelong obsession. He has raised her on stories of early man, taken her to witness rare artifacts, recounted time and again their rituals and beliefs—particularly their sacrifices to the bog. Mixing with the students, Silvie begins to see, hear, and imagine another kind of life, one that might include going to university, traveling beyond England, choosing her own clothes and food, speaking her mind.

The ancient Britons built ghost walls to ward off enemy invaders, rude barricades of stakes topped with ancestral skulls. When the group builds one of their own, they find a spiritual connection to the past. What comes next but human sacrifice?

A story at once mythic and strikingly timely, Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall urges us to wonder how far we have come from the “primitive minds” of our ancestors.

How and when I got it:

I bought this book sometime last year, and can’t for the life of me remember when or where! Maybe I buy too many books…

Why I want to read it:

I think I must have heard about this book through someone else’s book blog. That, or it was in the window display of my favorite local bookstore on one of my visits — that’s probably pretty likely! It’s a slim book, and the title and the cover are certainly eye-catching. Beyond the look of the book, the description makes it sound really terrific and disturbing and otherworldly. I’m glad I stumbled across this book again this week, because I definitely want to read it!

What do you think? Would you read this book?

Please share your thoughts!

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23Nov2019

Book Review: Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo

Posted in Book Reviews by Lisa @ Bookshelf Fantasies

Title: Ninth House
Author: Leigh Bardugo
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Publication date: October 8, 2019
Length: 458 pages
Genre: Fantasy/horror
Source: Purchased
Rating:

Galaxy “Alex” Stern is the most unlikely member of Yale’s freshman class. Raised in the Los Angeles hinterlands by a hippie mom, Alex dropped out of school early and into a world of shady drug dealer boyfriends, dead-end jobs, and much, much worse. By age twenty, in fact, she is the sole survivor of a horrific, unsolved multiple homicide. Some might say she’s thrown her life away. But at her hospital bed, Alex is offered a second chance: to attend one of the world’s most elite universities on a full ride. What’s the catch, and why her?

Still searching for answers to this herself, Alex arrives in New Haven tasked by her mysterious benefactors with monitoring the activities of Yale’s secret societies. These eight windowless “tombs” are well-known to be haunts of the future rich and powerful, from high-ranking politicos to Wall Street and Hollywood’s biggest players. But their occult activities are revealed to be more sinister and more extraordinary than any paranoid imagination might conceive.

Ninth House was one of the biggest, buzziest releases of fall 2019. Author Leigh Bardugo is a wildly popular YA author, and with Ninth House, she ventures into adult fiction with a bang, getting hyped by the master, Stephen King, among other notables.

Whoo boy, with praise like that, how can a mere human like me ever attempt to write a review?

Let’s give it a try.

In Ninth House, we’re plunged right into the action as Alex Stern hides out alone with a grave injury, contemplating what went wrong and what happens next. But what exactly happened, and what is this thing called Lethe that we see her thinking about? All will be revealed…

Alex arrives at Yale completely unprepared. She’s an impoverished high school dropout, a former drug user and dealer, and the sole survivor of a brutal mass murder. She’s offered a fresh start with a full scholarship to Yale, courtesy of Lethe House.

Yale’s most famous exclusive society is Skull & Bones, but there are actually many more. In Ninth House, the Ancient Eight are bastions of the rich and famous and their up and coming offspring, and each house has its own connection to the arcane. The houses’ powers are what fuel their alumni’s fortunes and influence, and they each have distinctive rituals that keep their magic topped up and charged. Lethe, the ninth house, is not one of these. Rather, Lethe was founded as a watchdog — they’re the ones who monitor the rituals and make sure they keep within the bounds of the rules, preventing uncontrolled magic from escaping into the world, and keeping the Grays (ghosts) from crossing over from beyond the Veil.

While Lethe members don’t have magic themselves, they have access to a vast store of knowledge and materials that allows them to carry out the warding and protective functions that keep the houses’ rituals operating mostly within determined limits. Alex is different, though. She doesn’t need Lethe’s elixirs to see beyond — she’s been cursed all her life by her ability to see and interact with Grays. And now that she’s at Yale, she’s caught up in unprecedented Gray activity, as well as a murder on campus that could be unrelated… or it could be the key to a sinister plot that threatens the magical equilibrium.

Alex is a fabulous lead character. She’s edgy and wild, but has a past that torments her and secrets that she’s only now coming to terms with. She’s brave even when terrified, and despite being a loner, manages to make connections with her roommate and a fellow Lethe member in ways that support all the best elements of true female friendship.

The magical systems are fascinating, but — a warning for the squeamish — do not read this book if you have a weak stomach! There are some pretty disgusting scenes, with copious amounts of blood, body parts, guts, and more. Ick — but it’s not gratuitous. The violence and horror completely serve the plot, and I normally don’t mind horror, but there were a few places that left me feeling like I needed to scrub my brain in order to remove some particularly unpleasant images.

I do have a few quibbles — chiefly, this book is so detail-heavy that unless you’re prepared to either take notes or read straight through (stock up on coffee!), there’s almost too much to keep track of. Each house has its powers, its players, its agenda, its rituals… and we really do need to be able to distinguish one from the other in order to follow Alex’s investigation and the conspiracy it reveals. None of this is a negative, but it does feel overwhelming to try to pick up the pieces of the plot again after taking a break to — I don’t know — maybe sleep or work or eat.

Do I recommend Ninth House? Absolutely! It’s a mesmerizing, engrossing read. But I do suggest picking a time to read it when you have time to dive in and really concentrate.

24Nov2018

Take A Peek Book Review: The Agony House by Cherie Priest

Posted in Book Reviews by Lisa @ Bookshelf Fantasies

“Take a Peek” book reviews are short and (possibly) sweet, keeping the commentary brief and providing a little peek at what the book’s about and what I thought.

Synopsis:

(via Goodreads)

Denise Farber has just moved back to New Orleans with her mom and step-dad. They left in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and have finally returned, wagering the last of their family’s money on fixing up an old, rundown house and converting it to a bed and breakfast. Nothing seems to work around the place, which doesn’t seem too weird to Denise. The unexplained noises are a little more out of the ordinary, but again, nothing too unusual. But when floors collapse, deadly objects rain down, and she hears creepy voices, it’s clear to Denise that something more sinister lurks hidden here. Answers may lie in an old comic book Denise finds concealed in the attic: the lost, final project of a famous artist who disappeared in the 1950s. Denise isn’t budging from her new home, so she must unravel the mystery-on the pages and off-if she and her family are to survive…

My Thoughts:

Similarly to her work in the terrific I Am Princess X, in The Agony House author Cherie Priest tells a gripping story with comic book illustrations mixed in to tell a piece of the tale. When Denise discovers the hidden comic book in the creepy attic of her new house (which she bluntly refers to as a “craphole” at all times), the book seems to be a clue to the unexplainable events happening to the family as they try to make the old place livable once again.

Denise is a great main character — clearly very smart, devoted to her family, but unhappy with being dragged away from her friends back in Houston and forced to live in this awful house. As she settles in and gets to know some of the teens in her neighborhood, we get a picture of the devastation left by the Storm (as they refer to it), even after so many years. The book deals with issues around economic hardship, gentrification, and privilege, not in a preachy way, but by showing the struggles and resentments of the characters and the new understandings they need to reach in order to get along. The social lessons here feel organic and important to the story, and I appreciated seeing the characters come to terms with one another in all sorts of interesting ways.

I’d place The Agony House somewhere between middle grade and young adult fiction. The main characters are high school seniors, but the events and the narrative would be fine for younger readers, middle school or above, so long as they’re okay with ghosts and spookiness. I really enjoyed the comic book pages and how they relate to the main story, and thought it was all very cleverly put together. As an adult reader, I saw the plot resolution twist coming pretty early on, but that didn’t lessen the satisfaction of seeing it all work out, and I think it’ll be a great surprise for readers in the target audience.

_________________________________________

The details:

Title: The Agony House
Author: Cherie Priest
Illustrator: Tara O’Connor
Publisher: Arthur A. Levine Books
Publication date: September 25, 2018
Length: 272 pages
Genre: Young adult fiction
Source: Library

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31Oct2018

Shelf Control #141: Things Half in Shadow by Alan Finn

Posted in Shelf Control by Lisa @ Bookshelf Fantasies

Welcome to Shelf Control — an original feature created and hosted by Bookshelf Fantasies.

Want to join in? Shelf Control posts go up every Wednesday. See the guidelines at the bottom of the post, and jump on board!

Title: Things Half in Shadow
Author: Alan Finn
Published: 2014
Length: 448 pages

What it’s about (synopsis via Goodreads):

Postbellum America makes for a haunting backdrop in this historical and supernatural tale of moonlit cemeteries, masked balls, cunning mediums, and terrifying secrets waiting to be unearthed by an intrepid crime reporter.

The year is 1869, and the Civil War haunts the city of Philadelphia like a stubborn ghost. Mothers in black continue to mourn their lost sons. Photographs of the dead adorn dim sitting rooms. Maimed and broken men roam the streets. One of those men is Edward Clark, who is still tormented by what he saw during the war. Also constantly in his thoughts is another, more distant tragedy–the murder of his mother at the hands of his father, the famed magician Magellan Holmes…a crime that Edward witnessed when he was only ten.

Now a crime reporter for one of the city’s largest newspapers, Edward is asked to use his knowledge of illusions and visual trickery to expose the influx of mediums that descended on Philadelphia in the wake of the war. His first target is Mrs. Lucy Collins, a young widow who uses old-fashioned sleight of hand to prey on grieving families. Soon, Edward and Lucy become entwined in the murder of Lenora Grimes Pastor, the city’s most highly regarded–and by all accounts, legitimate–medium, who dies mid-seance. With their reputations and livelihoods at risk, Edward and Lucy set out to find the real killer, and in the process unearth a terrifying hive of secrets that reaches well beyond Mrs. Pastor.

Blending historical detail with flights of fancy, Things Half in Shadow is a riveting thriller where Medium and The Sixth Sensemeet The Alienist–and where nothing is quite as it seems…

How and when I got it:

I picked this up at the library book sale two years ago. I’d never heard of it before, but once I read the back of the book, I just had to have it.

Why I want to read it:

So many great elements — seances, spiritualism, historical fiction, murder mystery — this book sounds like something I’ll really sink my teeth into! As for why I haven’t read it yet, well, blame the book sale: Each year, I come home with bags of books… and some just never make it up from the bottom of the pile.

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3Apr2013

Book Review: The Uninvited Guests by Sadie Jones

Posted in Book Reviews by Lisa @ Bookshelf Fantasies

Book Review: The Uninvited Guests by Sadie Jones

To say that The Uninvited Guests was not what I expected is an understatement. Based on the cover (gorgeous, right?) and the four pages of blurbs at the front of the books, six of which compare the book to Downton Abbey, I thought I’d be reading a comedy of manners or a genteel but gently critical view of the Upstairs, Downstairs dynamics of early 20th century classism. Instead, what I experienced was a bizarre tale of a wealthy family on the brink of financial disaster that — BOOM — suddenly became a ghost story full of decay, mad hauntings and vengeful spirits, and a house that literally falls to pieces overnight.

At the heart of The Uninvited Guests is the Torrington family, about to celebrate daughter Emerald’s 20th birthday. (Think of Emerald as the Mary Crawley of the piece, if you will). Mother Charlotte is remarried to the reliable, loving Edward Swift, who in turn is resented by Emerald and her brother Clovis. Alas, the manor house bought decades earlier by their late father Horace is on the verge of financial collapse, and so Edward travels away from home for a night in a last-ditch effort to save the family estate by securing a loan from an unpleasant business acquaintance.

Invited guests — a wealthy neighbor and some dear friends — come to Sterne for the birthday celebration, but unfortunately, so do quite a few uninvited guests, victims of a train derailment somewhere nearby, now stranded and in need of shelter until the railroad can make other arrangements. As the family attempts to carry on with the birthday feast, they neglect their unwanted guests until guilt and unanticipated chaos further disrupt the evening. As events spiral out of control, baser, crueler natures emerge. As the night turns wilder and wilder, the house itself is slowly destroyed from the inside, as filth, rot, rain, and mud overtake it inch by inch, and the family must come together to defeat the elements, both natural and supernatural.

I suppose you could read The Uninvited Guests as an allegory for the rot at the heart of the class system, or an indictment of the type of stiff-upper-lip social demands that keep children at arm’s length from parents and demand propriety at the expense of feeling. I see all that in this book, and yet it just doesn’t work for me. The characters are not sympathetic or even particularly well-defined, the events veer all over the place, and the supernatural elements come and go in ways that feel forced and out place. The weirdly cheerful and sunshine-filled ending was quite dissonant with the rest of the story, and I didn’t feel like this awkward, cold family earned the easy resolution that came their way.

The Uninvited Guests is full of interesting language choices and passages of quite lovely writing. Still, I found the whole to be disjointed and rather unsatisfying.

Ending thoughts: I will acknowledge that perhaps it’s me, not the book. The endless blurbs for this book are completely glowing, and my city’s public library system has chosen The Uninvited Guests as its city-wide read this month. Perhaps I missed something that everyone else saw in it. In any case, all I can offer is my own opinion: While I was never bored, and was even intrigued by certain developments, on the whole, this book just did not work for me.