This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
Reviewed by Verity Wilde
Greta has just got married and wants to move back home to the Isle of Wight. During a weekend visit there to see her parents, she and her husband Max spot a remote and rundown cottage. Soon they’ve bought it from a local vicar and Greta sets about transforming it into their dream house. But as the renovations get underway, strange things start happening and Greta ends up getting a celebrity medium involved to try to help fight the supernatural problems at the cottage. Is Greta’s dream home going to turn into a nightmare?
I liked the idea behind this book, but I have to admit I struggled with it. There are some lovely descriptions of the Isle of Wight and the author clearly loves the setting, but the actual story was problematic. I found Greta very hard to like – she’s difficult, demanding and almost too stupid to live. There were a lot of moments in the book where it felt like if she was faced with a choice between a dark and treacherous path and a nice bright well lit one, Greta would chose the obviously dangerous one but for no good reason and without realising what she was doing. And there wasn’t really anyone else that I was rooting for either. Now I know that you don’t always have to like the protagonists of a book, but when they’re engaged in a fight against the spirit world, you need to at least have some sympathy with them.
This is not a long book, but it packs a lot of events in, sometimes before the last one feels resolved and it often feels like you don’t really understand why characters are doing what they’re doing (except because they’re in a book and they need to create peril). There is a (very) late plot twist that might be seen as explaining this (as well as why the secondary characters feel a bit flat and unreal) but by the time it happened, I was too bemused by the whole experience for it to work.3/10