I’m absolutely delighted to be the first one to review this book on Goodreads and maybe anywhere, because I really liked it and I can only hope my words will persuade more people to check it out. And to think, I didn’t even expect much out of it. Never heard of the author. Selected it almost strictly by the cover and let’s face it, that’s a great cover and lo and behold the book turned out to be just as good. Way to match the cover appeal.
There’s a quality to it, a very specific British darkness that lives in the everyday ordinary lives, a slow building dread, a slow boiling pot of normalcy that hits a certain degree and goes ballistic. It involves seemingly nice people who aren’t really all that nice and normal scenery that isn’t really all that normal. In my mind, this is a style most closely associated with the late great Ruth Rendell. Unlikable characters doing increasingly terrible things to each other. And, as it often the case with these things, it all starts with an obsession… The Ashes is a grand old dilapidated place at the end of a quiet street. For sale, but expensive, requiring much work to bring it back to shape, and prohibitive in its innate spookiness, it doesn’t have much of a curb appeal, but for Wendy, it’s a dream come true. She immediately becomes enchanted with it, something neither her spouse nor her three kid share, and when a happy chain of events leads her to have the means to purchase and renovate it, she does. Soon enough The Ashes is alive once again…and maybe entirely touch so. Are there voices in the night? Creaks in the attic? After all, what old place doesn’t have a murderous secret or two. Wendy is determined to know all there is to know about her beloved Ashes, but in following her obsession she ends up driving away all she previously held so dear… Each chapter is prefaced with something like a diary entry chronicling living with a grave and deadly secret, but only at the end do you really find out the details, so there’s a nice plot twist there. But the rest of the novel is more of a drama, family drama, with some slight supernatural aspects and some mystery elements. It’s well crafted, albeit leisurely paced. For me, it read so slowly I suspected the page count to be off, but in a very enjoyable way. I liked the descriptions, The Ashes alone takes up the first 10% easily. The pacing really worked here, though, it’s that kind of a story, Just like the Britishness really worked. Just like setting it back some decades worked, providing certain more traditional family dynamics, which are necessary to the story. It’s bleak, of course, but it’s such a well rendered bleakness. Wendy’s love for The Ashes, like some of the best love stories, is a tragic affair, but it’s such a strangely compelling one. I enjoyed reading it. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley.
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