Book Review: Starling House by Alix E. Harrow
The Details
Media Type: Audiobook
Title: Starling House
Author(s): Alix E. Harrow
Publisher: Macmillan Audio
Pages/Length: 12 hours 16 minutes
Release Date: October 3, 2023
Source: Library Borrow
Add it on: Goodreads | Amazon | Bookshop
A grim and gothic new tale from author Alix E. Harrow about a small town haunted by secrets that can’t stay buried and the sinister house that sits at the crossroads of it all.
Eden, Kentucky, is just another dying, bad-luck town, known only for the legend of E. Starling, the reclusive nineteenth-century author and illustrator who wrote The Underland–and disappeared. Before she vanished, Starling House appeared. But everyone agrees that it’s best to let the uncanny house―and its last lonely heir, Arthur Starling―go to rot.
Opal knows better than to mess with haunted houses or brooding men, but an unexpected job offer might be a chance to get her brother out of Eden. Too quickly, though, Starling House starts to feel dangerously like something she’s never had: a home.
As sinister forces converge on Starling House, Opal and Arthur are going to have to make a dire choice to dig up the buried secrets of the past and confront their own fears, or let Eden be taken over by literal nightmares.
If Opal wants a home, she’ll have to fight for it.
The Review
Oh man, okay. Where do I start with this one? Starling House has me baffled. By all rights it should have been one of my favorite novels. All of the signs are there. A magical, sentient house. A dark underworld. A tenacious main character who sacrifices everything in order to care for those she loves. Alas, something here just didn’t click. I’ll do my best to explain.
Starling House suffers from pacing issues, and that’s what really had me struggling. It has the main plot points of a novella length story, but attempts the character growth and world building of a much longer book. Opal and her brother are the products of a tragedy that shook their entire world. Their current living situation, all the people around them that they love, Opal’s strength and maternal affection for her brother, all of that was born from that tragedy. Yet somehow it seems like that whole idea is never fully fleshed out. It’s like the town has resigned itself to these mysterious deaths, and so should we as readers.
Opal and Arthur do get the main character treatment, which I appreciated. I felt like they had a decent amount of depth to them, even though I really craved to know more about Arthur’s past. However our secondary characters barely get any love at all. Supporting characters don’t always get a ton of backstory, I know. Still even the two people who help Opal the most in this story, and seem to love her as their own, get the thinnest amount of literary love possible.
Even the house, which in my opinion is one of the best characters in this book, doesn’t feel like it receives the limelight it is so deserving of. Starling House is intriguing in that it requires inhabitants to sustain itself. It needs to be cared for, much like a child. As Arthur points out, it needs protector and it’s very willing to take one who hasn’t exactly signed up for the job. To me, that means this haunted home should be one of the main tenants of the storyline. Yet, it still never really gets to shine or be fully fleshed out.
In fact that’s how a lot of this book feels. Like little strands of ideas that were carefully laid down into a tapestry and then snipped off before it was completed, for no discernible reason. Maybe the book needed to be longer? Maybe the many tropes that there are present here needed to be trimmed a bit? Either way the fact remains that this book, as it is now, just fees unfinished. And because of that it feels flat in a lot of ways. The ending especially just felt rushed and disappointing.
Now let me end with what I did love though, and explain why I gave this book a three star rating. At the heart of this story is the idea that history is written by the victors. That tragic things happen every day that are glossed over, and forgotten through the normal passage of time. Sadly, quite often, the real stories of those who are oppressed, enslaved and murdered never come to light. Eden is a town that is full of these stories, where people looked away and chose to believe what was the easiest to stomach rather than the truth. Starling House is a direct manifestation of that and I just thought that was beautiful. As Opal dug into the sordid history of the town, and brought to light the reasons why the curse on that house existed, I was fascinated. This is where the gothic vibes of this story really shine.
So, once again, super torn on this one. I’m sticking with my rating because I stand by my reading notes. Just still sad that this won’t end up as one my favorites.
