Genre: Gothic

Age: Adult

I was excited for this one – I love seeing modern writers tackle gothic, and I was intrigued by the blurb for this, keen to see which direction it took. Unfortunately, it did not take an interesting direction, and instead trod a well-worn path, ignoring any mildly intriguing possibilities along the way.

Elspeth takes a job as a nanny on a remote Scottish island. Not because she has any experience in this, but simply because she wants to and she’s lonely. Her charge, Mary, has not spoken since her brother died. Her employer keeps the family’s secrets close to her chest, and the other islanders are just as mysterious, until it becomes relevant for plot reasons to tell Elspeth anything actually useful.

There are a lot of women in this book, and they’re all poorly written. None of the characters seem to have any personality outside their assigned roles, the story itself is full of cliché after cliché. The way it’s written feels way too forced to make it sound “historical” without actually managing to do so. It read like a fanfic of The Haunting of Bly Manor, taking it back to the general era of The Turn of the Screw but based on a skimming of the book itself.

Elspeth comes across as selfish and idiotic, taking whatever anyone tells her at face value and never actually questioning why so many people think an actual child is Quite Literally Evil. The vast majority of what appears in this book has been done before, but in better ways. I was really hoping to see something more here, but instead Elspeth seems to find out information, proceed to ignore it or take the wrong thing from what she’s discovered. She treats Mary poorly, and almost every interaction between the two has Elspeth demanding Mary speak, though one does have her admitting to the poor kid she knows her brother and former nanny had both ‘gone bad’, without any consideration how the kid might feel about that.

The prose is repetitive and overladen with telling – that is, we’re constantly told about various things, such as one of the maids hating Elspeth, but we never actually see evidence of it. Elspeth fumbles her way through a thin plot that ends in an overly cliché manner, and this was a book I found myself feeling frustrated at more often than not. I’d recommend actually reading The Turn of the Screw instead if you haven’t already, or revisiting it if you want to read something similar, though there are also plenty of excellent gothic titles to choose from out there and if you are looking for something gothic to read this spooky season, I’d suggest one of them instead.

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Review by Elle Turpitt

Twitter: @elleturpitt

Bluesky: @elleturpitt.bsky.social

www.elleturpittediting.com

I received this ebook from Penguin Michael Joseph UK via NetGalley for review consideration.