I really wanted to love this one, and honestly I can see why other people do. It's billed as a sapphic, gender-swapped Victorian version of Hamlet, which sounded brilliant on paper, and the writing itself is genuinely good, moody and rich and clearly put together with a lot of care. There were bits where I stopped just to reread a sentence because of how it was phrased.
But good writing on its own isn't enough to carry a whole book, and that's where this fell down for me. It's heavy from start to finish. Every single relationship in it circles the same grief and the same slow unravelling, mothers and daughters, sisters, lovers, all of it looping back to the same dark place. I found myself needing to put it down and come back later, not because I was gripped, but because it was genuinely a lot to sit with for that long.
The middle section also drags, which didn't help. Not much actually happens for a good stretch of it, and when a book is already this emotionally heavy, having less plot to hold onto makes it feel even slower than it probably is.
So two stars from me. I don't think this is badly written at all, it's just a hard book to read and get into. I've come round to thinking that a hard read doesn't automatically mean a good read, or even an enjoyable one. This was a solid piece of writing and that heaviness just didn't sit well with me, and that in turn means I'm unlikely to read anything more from the same author. Some books earn that heaviness. This one just kind of sat in it.
Our rating 2/5
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