Starling House by Alix E. Harrow
Starling House
by Alix E. Harrow
Fantasy | Mystery | Romance
308 Pages
Released October 2023
Rating: ★★
Goodreads
Content Warnings
A couple years ago, I read The Ten Thousand Doors of January which I found to be good despite its underwhelming ending…so I decided to give Alix Harrow another go. Unfortunately, this book missed the mark for me. It was an interesting concept that was poorly executed.
This book follows Opal, still stuck in the dead-end town she grew up in. She’s raising her younger brother after the sudden death of their mother and doing best to make ends meet. The only thing her town is known for its the elusive author Eleanor Starling and her equally mysterious home, Starling House. Opal feels drawn to the house in a way she can’t explain. And when the home’s brooding current owner offers her a lucrative position, Opal agrees. But there’s more to Starling House than meets the eye and there’s people in her town that would pay to learn its secrets.
First, this book is only 300ish pages but despite that, it felt so slow. I can’t put my finger on exactly what made the book feel slow but I struggled to get through it. There were several other things that bothered me as well. First, I found the relationships in this novel ridiculously frustrating. The romance feels very forced - they barely interact and then, boom, instalove by the end of the book. Even worse, many of the side characters (including the main character’s brother who she’s been raising after the death of their mother) feel like one-dimensional plot devices to help push the story along. Finally, there’s a reveal that happens toward the latter half of the book that I just cannot fathom the main character wasn’t aware of, especially since she’s living in a small, everyone-knows-everyone town.
I was also not a fan of all the different retellings of Eleanor Starling (the mysterious author and original owner of Starling House) - seriously, there’s like 4 or 5 versions and each we are trickled a little more of the truth in each version. It just started getting very repetitive and tiresome.
There’s also a bit of a villain in this story but again, it just felt random and out of place. The two small things that I did enjoy: the house itself (in a manner of speaking, it was also a character in the book) and hellcat (even if it didn’t really add much to the story).
Overall, while the plot was somewhat interesting, it was no enough to save the book from poorly written characters. If you enjoy mystery and fantasy and don’t mind an instalove romance between a plucky pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps main character and a brooding love interest, then you may enjoy this one. Personally? I don’t think I’ll be reading any more of Harrow’s work any time soon.