Length: 352 Pages
Genres: Historical Mystery, Historical Fiction, Gothic, LGBTQ
Rating: 5 out of 5 Stars
"In my dreams, there was a beast hunting me through the corridors on padded feet as I fled, dressing gown flapping behind me like the useless wings of a flightless bird. The beast was larger than a hound, too large for any mammal without hooves native to this island, and sometimes it was not a beast at all, but a woman with the claws of an animal and crazed eyes smeared with soot, who crawled out of a mirror dressed in white and trailed pale petals in her wake."
Trigger Warnings in this book for child abuse, sexual assault, and rape
I have been waiting to read this novel since I very first saw it, and let me tell you it did not let me down. This book is my favorite I've read of 2020 so far, and I think you should read it, too. It is everything I've dreamed of in a book for so long - ghosts, old mysterious estates with even more mysterious rooms, and most importantly, a slow and rewarding romance between the heroine and the troubled daughter of the house!
Hetty Cartwright is a loner, her dearest friends the taxidermied animals that she looks after at the Natural History Museum of London. But with the coming of WWII and the threat of bombs, they are no longer safe, so she follows them to their new home in the countryside at Lockwood Manor. The house is foreboding, the owner, Lord Lockwood, even more so, but beneath the dark shadows and secrets there is a glimmer of light - Lucy Lockwood, troubled as much as she is beautiful and kind. She is plagued by terrible nightmares, of a dead leveret from her childhood, a monster that chases her through the many rooms of the house, and most importantly, a blue room that doesn't exist.
We get an insight into Lucy through chapters told by her and of her fear that she is just as mad as her mother was. This is not the first time Lucy has been unwell, but all of it dragged back up by the shocking death of her mother, who was plagued by ghosts both figurative and imagined, and her grandmother.
Hetty is plagued by her own problems, both internal and external. I related to the character of Hetty more than I've ever related to another, and I felt every pain, joy, and shock as if it were my own.
I'm going through one of my hardest points in my life right now, and I struggle every day with my OCD, anxiety, and depression. Many of her fears were the same as mine: her fear of being alone but also seeking the familiar comfort of it, her feeling of being unworthy of Lucy or of love in general. I understood her loneliness as a woman who loved another woman in wartime Britain as much as I understand my own as a bisexual woman from a small Texas city. But unlike Hetty, who has no one in her life, her mother a cruel and distant memory, I do have family, who I love deeply and who support me. I was so sorry for her.
To add to her anxieties, some of the animals start going missing, the first victim the jaguar. And then a display of old hummingbirds, and some ivory. Hetty keeps feeling as if the animals have been rearranged in the room but can't be sure - is she imagining it, or is something more nefarious going on? As Hetty and Lucy grow closer, Lucy's problems come to the forefront. She is scared to leave Lockwood, but scared to stay, and Hetty is lost on how to help.
The end of this book was sweeter than I could have hoped for and made my heart ache, and did something else very important - it made me realize that we're all strange and sad in our own ways, but we all can find someone to be strange and sad with.
Jane Healey can write, and write well. I loved reading this book and was jealous as many times as I was delighted by her prose. She has secured herself a firm spot on my must-read list. The hardcover is so gorgeous I'm thinking about buying it, though I rarely buy physical copies any more!
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