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I’ll say right off that I had to read this book, without paying any attention to the summary, because Alix Harrow charmed me so much with Ten Thousand Doors of January. That novel was just about everything I could ask for in a book. That being said, it can be tricky loving an author’s work so much that you may have sky-high hopes for something new. (Also having said that, I did read her Once and Future Witches and enjoyed it without attaching too many expectations. So there’s that.)
Anyway… Starling House has a much different feel to it. Where January definitely had challenges for the protagonists, its tone was lighter and more hopeful throughout. This one is grim and dark, and happily-ever-after was not necessarily a given.
Opal has grown up mostly in a motel room, scraping by to survive. Since her mother died when she was a teenager, she’s been taking care of her younger brother, Jasper. He is her reason to keep going, to keep enduring all the difficulties life (and her judgmental little town) throw at her.
Every day she passes by the falling-down old mansion in town, Starling House, and she can’t help but feel drawn to it. She’s been having dreams (well, nightmares) about it, about living there.
The woman who built the house, E. Starling, wrote one quite dark children’s book a century before and then disappeared. Opal loved that book. Little does she know that the story was not simply the product of a wonderfully creative mind.
While the house seems derelict, it’s not empty: a young man lives there, though no one ever sees him. Then Opal intrudes on the house, and on Arthur, and he reluctantly gives her a job of cleaning it, for much more money than she makes at her retail job (and she needs every bit of that money for Jasper). The story gets going there, of course: two haunted loners interact in a dark house with a dark history.
What Opal especially doesn’t know is that monsters are real, and she gets pulled into fighting them. And as she does so, the town’s secrets are going to be exposed.
Starling House is a solid dark fantasy romance. It’s beautifully written and evocative, as the author’s other books. I thought the origin of the monsters an interesting one, and the doomed romance between Opal and Arthur fit the bill. But I just didn’t LOVE this book. Worth reading, but you don’t need to put it top of your to-read list. (This also has a very solid high rating, rather than moderate.)
Rated: High. Profanity includes 40 uses of strong language, around 75 instances of moderate profanity, about 45 uses of mild language, and 60 instances of the name of Deity in vain. The main characters have sex, with some details. Violence is sometimes intense: there’s plenty of injuries and blood and danger.
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