TandeWrites

Today, in honour of me committing to reviewing all of my favourite reads of the year so far, we’re going to be reviewing Starling House by Alix E. Harrow, a seasonally appropriate book I read earlier in the year and fell in love with.

Let’s begin!

Nobody in Eden, a small town in Kentucky, remembers when Starling House was built, but the town agrees it’s best to let the ill-omened mansion and its last lonely heir go to hell. Opal knows better than to mess with haunted houses or brooding men, but when an opportunity to work there arises, the money might get her brother out of Eden, and the stories of the house’s bad luck which have been passed down for generations are too much to resist. But Opal isn’t the only one interested in the horrors and the wonders that lie beneath Starling House, and she realises that if she wants a home, she’ll have to fight for it, even if it involves digging up her family’s ugly past to go down, deep down beneath her house, and claw her way back to the light.

On the surface, this is a book about a haunted house that is trying to call a girl home, and the lonely boy trapped inside longing for an escape. But, beneath that, it’s about the power of dreams to haunted people, the horrors of generational poverty, and how family bonds can both imprison and liberate.

Starling House feels like a reckoning as much as a journey towards healing, and I don’t think that I will ever stop swooning about it. This book is a sweeping gothic fairytale for fans of atmospheric fantasy set against a backdrop of mystery and suspense. I loved how festeringly dark and whimsical this story felt, almost like a fairytale retelling, whilst seamlessly blending with the contemporary ‘our world’ setting. The story is haunting, staying just shy of full-blown horror, and the moody tone truly enhances the reading experience. It was almost like a story suspended in time.

I am in love with Opal, the protagonist of the story. I love her resilience and unwavering determination to do whatever it takes to provide a better life for her brother, even if it does involve working in an allegedly haunted mansion. Her love for him was heartwarming, and I adore how the author captured the nuances of their relationship. I also love how Opal’s ‘clever heroine’ role fits in perfectly with Arthur’s ‘tortured heir’, and how they’re somehow both buried under the weight of their pasts and unable to figure out how to drag themselves out of the darkness. The tentative romance between them is very Noah Kahan “we should rot together”-esque, and I am more than here for two individuals who have just been trying to survive until the moment they met deciding that they should survive together. I think I felt the full emotional spectrum reading their relationship.

Something that stands out to me is the story’s exploration of how a place can be haunted by the past. Opal is given a life-changing offer to dig up secrets about the house for a company and does some digging for her own sake, and another history is discovered each time she probes, rewriting previously believed histories and creating more mysteries than answers. Every character in this book goes to great lengths to rewrite history with their own version of events until the truth falls through the cracks and ghosts come back from the grave. And I love a story about stories: Starling House is known for being the home to a reclusive 19th-century author and illustrator who disappeared, leaving both her mansion and a mystery behind. Her works become the key to solving one of the mysteries.

My only issue with the book is revealed somewhere in the length and the pacing. It’s too long and slow to be a novella, but too fast and short to feel truly complete as a full-length novel. There’s simultaneously a lot happening yet not enough–some of the characterisation and plot points feel underdeveloped in places. And this feels overly critical as I did give the book five stars, but my current reviewing policy is that any book that made me feel something deserves five stars even if it isn’t as close to perfect as anyone can imagine, and this book did make me feel something. It made me feel a lot. And all the concepts are there to grab my attention–spooky house, cursed families, engaging writing–but I think the book needed more pages, so these elements had room to breathe, or fewer pages so it felt more concise and developed. But this is me being overly nitpicky about a book I adored.

In summary, this is a haunting book about just trying to survive, and it’s a story I’m going to be thinking about for a long time.