Caitlin, a rich heiress and owner of a truly extravagant renovated
mansion seems to have it all. Sadly, she also has a cheating husband.
Caitlin’s rage at his betrayal invokes an old power lying
beneath the house – a lethal power that seizes on her revenge for its own
deadly purpose
It’s down to Nova, the daughter of Caitlin’s
groundskeeper and Blake, her estranged best friends, to get to the bottom of
the mystery and find out what it is she has invoked.
The atmosphere of the book is excellent. This is a horror
novel and it brings the creepy – and a whole lot of mystery. There is a lot of
tension in the book from almost the beginning and there is no scrimping on the
horror. A lot of this comes from the unknown – because the Vines quickly become
more and more complicated than simple angry, vengeance seeking plants which
continues to add to the tension and the unknown. Every time I thought I knew
how this worked, every time I thought that I would know who was at risk or not
the rules changed, we had some more revealed and the threat became more
universal again. The ground kept shifting, the mystery kept growing, the
creepiness was always maintained
The language also hit the right balance. It was elaborate
and gothic and descriptive – juuuuust edging towards being overly descriptive
and overly flowery – but then pulling back from the edge. It held on the cusp
of being just a bit too much for most of the book, instead adding really nicely
to the atmosphere of it.
However, elaborate language, hefty description coupled
with a shifting deep mystery meant there were times when I was lost and trying
to figure out where we were going, what was happening and why because
everything just kind of stumbled into confusion for a bit in the middle and
towards the end.
It also has a revenge plot and raises the issue of both
what will you sacrifice for revenge and what revenge makes you, as a person. It’s
interesting and knotty
I was really pleasantly surprised by how this book
presented the setting – and I don’t mean the magic. This book is set in a very
wealthy, restored plantation house outside of Louisiana, with some delving into
the past. A lot of books set in this time and place have a… overly romanticised
view of the setting. I’ve seen far too many happy-Black-slaves and devoted
Black servants just falling over themselves to serve the rich White family they
adore so.
This was not that book. The rich, restored plantation was
not allowed to escape its history even while it was clear the white owner and
tourists very much preferred it that way (and how the whole building’s tourism
was based around romanticising that history). It was an excellent depiction
that wonderfully skewered the romanticism we see far too often.
In fact, the general depiction of both the marginalised
characters in this book – who served as co-protagonists – was excellent. Blake
is gay man and Nova is a Black woman. Both of them excellently experience and
present the problems discrimination causes – not just the big overt issues like
discrimination, fear of the police and hate crimes, but there’s an excellent
depiction of micro-aggressions – the annoying assumptions people make, the
words they choose to use, the stereotypes they constantly try to pin to
marginalised people, feelings of “collective responsibility” and the idea that
they need to present better than that. There’s also excellent ways they both
interact with Caitlin – she assumes Blake should be grateful for their
friendship, despite her crossing the line of what is acceptable and him often
having to support her. And how she still looks at Willie (Nova‘s father) as
“family” even though Nova is clear that he’s an underpaid employee (there was
an excellent line about them working all Caitlin’s parties, but never being
invited to them. It just wonderfully attacked the whole privileged idea of
these servants being such joyous family members rather than often exploited employees.
Honestly, I can’t even list the many ways this book got
depiction of oppression and these character’s issues right because there’s so many
of them and there are so many ways that the characters have to include the
prejudice of others in their interactions and thoughts; it works and it works
well
Both Blake and Nova are intelligent, insightful, angry
when warranted but not unnecessarily for. They care for the people in their
lives, they have a reasonable scepticism when called for but don’t hold on to
it past when it’s clear that there’s some serious woo-woo going on. They both
have very separate personalities, they both have a history and goals and
passions and they both step up to the events in the book.
Caitlin is a less great character – we see most of her
through the eyes of Blake and Nova and it isn’t flattering. She is rich, she is
spoiled, she does take people for granted – but she’s not a demon, she
genuinely tries (showing how genuinely trying is not a miracle worker). She
also has her own terrible conflicts – the daughter of an extremely rich man she
was expected to do two things – be pretty and find a husband. Nothing else
about her was ever encourage and, the problem is, the whole “be pretty” part of
the deal wasn’t in her genes. Caitlin has appalling self-esteem, she has lived
her whole life being valued for one thing and then being told that she doesn’t
hit the mark. She’s insecure, she’s angry and she’s just ready to unleash when
she catches her husband cheating – and she does. All that rage and pain bubbles
up gloriously. Unfortunately, it also bubbles up a huge amount of slut shaming
and misogynist language for the woman her husband was sleeping with – but the
primary target of her wrath is her husband.
In all this was a book that was a lot better than I
expected. It was creepy, mysterious, entirely original and full of some
excellent deconstruction of tropes we’ve seen repeated over and over and over
again.
