Starling House

by Alix E. Harrow

Genres: Fantasy
Pages: 308
Rating:

Synopsis:

I dream sometimes about a house I’ve never seen….

Opal is a lot of things — orphan, high school dropout, full-time cynic and part-time cashier — but above all, she's determined to find a better life for her younger brother Jasper. One that gets them out of Eden, Kentucky, a town remarkable for only two things: bad luck and E. Starling, the reclusive nineteenth century author of The Underland, who disappeared over a hundred years ago.

All she left behind were dark rumors — and her home. Everyone agrees that it’s best to ignore the uncanny mansion and its misanthropic heir, Arthur. Almost everyone, anyway.

I should be scared, but in the dream I don’t hesitate.

Opal has been obsessed with The Underland since she was a child. When she gets the chance to step inside Starling House — and make some extra cash for her brother's escape fund — she can't resist.

But sinister forces are digging deeper into the buried secrets of Starling House, and Arthur’s own nightmares have become far too real. As Eden itself seems to be drowning in its own ghosts, Opal realizes that she might finally have found a reason to stick around.

In my dream, I’m home.

And now she’ll have to fight.

Welcome to Starling House: enter, if you dare.

I got the weirdest sense of deja vu when reading Alix E. Harrow’s Starling House; I definitely haven’t read it before, and I’m not sure what it reminded me of, but there were numerous elements that somehow rang a bell — like the book published by the original owner of the house, for example… There’s some overlap with Ava Reid’s A Study in Drowning, I think, but that’s not it. There’s also the life in the motel room, which is maybe reminding me of Supernatural? Maybe something else.

It’s got quite a bit of “Beauty and the Beast” DNA, after all, so maybe it’s just a bunch of similarities from a lot of different places, but anyway, it’s kind of distracting. There were aspects of the book I enjoyed, and when I was reading it I was pretty immersed, but Opal’s really self-defeating in a way that’s super frustrating to read, and I had trouble with the transition to romance as well.

The thing I loved was Opal’s relationship with her younger brother, Jasper, and her willingness to do just about anything for him (shades of Dean Winchester and Supernatural again). That was probably the strongest theme, and it was really believable and well-written that Opal would revolve around him like that. I was a bit surprised by how that ended up, though.

Overall, an interesting read and one I might’ve enjoyed more in another mood, with more patience to give to Opal’s failings? I’m not sure.

Rating: 3/5