Starling House
by Alix E. HarrowGenres: Fiction / Fantasy / Contemporary, Fiction / Gothic
Length: 12:26
Narrator: Natalie Naudus
Published on October 3, 2023
Pages: 320
Format: Audiobook Source: Library
I dream sometimes about a house I’ve never seen....Opal is a lot of things—orphan, high school dropout, full-time cynic and part-time cashier—but above all, she's determined to find a better life for her younger brother Jasper. One that gets them out of Eden, Kentucky, a town remarkable for only two things: bad luck and E. Starling, the reclusive nineteenth century author of The Underland, who disappeared over a hundred years ago.
All she left behind were dark rumors—and her home. Everyone agrees that it’s best to ignore the uncanny mansion and its misanthropic heir, Arthur. Almost everyone, anyway.
I should be scared, but in the dream I don’t hesitate.
Opal has been obsessed with The Underland since she was a child. When she gets the chance to step inside Starling House—and make some extra cash for her brother's escape fund—she can't resist.
But sinister forces are digging deeper into the buried secrets of Starling House, and Arthur’s own nightmares have become far too real. As Eden itself seems to be drowning in its own ghosts, Opal realizes that she might finally have found a reason to stick around.
In my dream, I’m home.
And now she’ll have to fight.
Welcome to Starling House: enter, if you dare.
When I realized that I’d be driving down to the National Book Festival in D.C. with someone else, I made her pick out an audiobook for the trip. I didn’t want to have to make conversation or worse, listen to music the whole way. She picked this book.
I’ve listened to Alix Harrow’s books before. She hadn’t. We ended up having pretty different opinions on this book.
Her books tend to be pretty slow moving. Her writing is more atmospheric than strictly plot driven. I tend to be a plot person but for a long road trip this was fine with me. It was driving her crazy. There was a point when she was yelling about being 6 hours into an audiobook and mostly it had been whining about how the main character was sad. I reminded her that she had been crying over a guy for months and she told me to shut up.
The second area of contention was point of view. When Opal is narrating it is in first person. When it is from Arthur’s perspective it is third person. Honestly, I don’t know that I would have consciously noticed that. I mean, I noticed a different tone but just accepted it. It made her batty. She kept wanting to know why.
We ended up not finishing the whole book on the trip. I kept listening since it was on my phone. Then I would go to work and tell her what had happened since I had seen her last. She said she enjoyed my Cliffs Note telling of the story better than the audiobook because I got to the point of the action more than brooding on my feelings. Maybe that was because we were getting to the end of the story and there was more action but I did just cut to the chase.
This book did have things I liked. I’m a sucker for a sentient house. I liked the main story of revenge once it got around to telling it. Just go into this book knowing that it is slow. You hear several versions of the story in order to work your way into finding out what the truth really is.
