4 🌟

Beautiful memoir (Montgomery) and illustrations (Green) showcasing how animals can teach us on how to be a good creature.  Heartwarming and do take care when reading as it discusses grief, suicide ideation, and death. 

Your honor, counsel has come to the following decisions:

Too many pages: GUILTY Quirky, sometimes cringey New Girl/Parks & Recreation humor and ridiculous situations: GUILTY Fun meta winks: GUILTY Supporting cast carrying the book: GUILTY Animal side character shenanigans: GUILTY Car sex: GUILTY Defendants Hazel Hart and Cam Bishop being dumbasses, pretending to be self aware while avoiding their feelings, but being hot and having undeniable chemistry: GUILTY ON ALL COUNTS

Yes, Hazel and Cam are guilty of being annoying and indulging in romcom ridiculousness. However, we believe the court must consider that they are hot and clueless, and adjust their punishment accordingly.

The defense rests its case.

I know Lucy Score had SO much fun writing this book. Hazel as a romance novelist is genius, it allowed for so many winks and nudges toward the reader that were so satisfying. This is a book that's aware of its genre conventions and uses them to its advantage to set its comedic foundation.

There were times I thought I knew where the book was going based on genre expectations, and I felt Lucy Score look at me, smile knowingly, and subvert them. It's not sophisticated or setting new literary standards, but it's smart and witty and playful and makes for such a fun and immersive reading experience.

On top of that, Story Lake's cast of weirdos who affectionately annoy the shit out of each other is hilarious and made the setting feel so lived-in and realistic. While I didn't always enjoy its millennial (said with love) humor, there were so many genuinely funny antics. I love a book that is ridiculous and smiles at its own ridiculousness unapologetically.

Cam and Hazel are such good leads and their chemistry is palpable from their first meeting. Cam undeniably has a hard exterior, but his care and interest in Hazel's interiority is always present, in the gruff man sort of way. Hazel is a genuine sunshine, and I appreciated that Score included a slightly darker complexity to her quirky, sweet persona.

Both characters are intertwined by their emotional avoidance in such a sweet, albeit sometimes eye-rolling way. Hazel being extremely self aware of romance and love stories yet struggling to recognize that she is herself inside of one until it's too late, and Cam's fear of vulnerability tied to his fear of loss, connected them endearingly, and yes, annoyingly.

Each character had enough specificity and human texture to feel like a recognizable member of the community. While exaggerated, these are people that anyone who lives in a small town would find familiar.

By the end, there's a heartwarming feeling of found family and genuine connection, which is especially lovely considering Hazel's struggle to find a place where she belongs. Seeing Hazel's transformation from depressed, lonely, struggling with self worth and lack of agency to a woman in control, making decisions toward a better future and regaining her confidence felt embodied and healing.

While the book is a little too long, a bit bloated with characters and information in order to set up later books in the series, the progression of over-the-top situations and constant cycling in and out of characters kept the book feeling fresh and fun.

It's silly, it's ridiculous, but Score's winks toward the reader make the more overdone tropes feel new, and intentionally included rather than lazy. I can't help it, this book is delightful.

Starling House is a book that feels clingy and sticky, a humid sort of suffocation. The novel is haunted not necessarily by things that are dead and rotting, but by things that are still a little bit too alive. Things that are too overgrown, too snarled to ignore. Years of emotions and memories and tragedies that have been swept under the metaphorical rug, mildewing and molding and begging to be unearthed.

Starling House's Eden is full of buried secrets and stories that change meaning based on who tells them, like a piece of glass that looks different depending on how it's held up to the light. Each new revelation uncovered by Opal becomes another fragment in a history that has been broken by time and omission and bias, a composition that gets slowly rebuilt throughout the entire novel until the very last page. The reader is left to piece them all together, with each new discovery recontextualizing everything that came before it.

Through Opal, Arthur, and Starling House, Harrow explores the idea of home and inheritance, what it means to belong and how we invent stories and identities to protect ourselves from loss and pain. A girl who has written off her future so early that she convinces herself that dreams are dangerous; a boy who has lost everything to the point of losing even himself; a house that wants so desperately to be loved but has trapped itself behind sycamores, slinking beasts, and stifling mists. Each of their arcs coil around the trauma of sacrifice and covering yourself with too much armor in the hopes that nothing will ever penetrate it.

Beneath these histories, personal and collective, there is a sense of porosity, a swampy feeling manifested in Starling House's Southern gothic lushness and its refusal to accept categorization. Stories bleed into one another, dreams leak into reality, characters inherit other people's narratives. Growth exists alongside corrosion, the living exist alongside the dead via the history they've left behind, everything is tactile and sensorially dense.

Eden is a landscape that has been opened like a wound, extracted from and buried. Yet, for all of its rot, there is a strange sort of beauty, a hope that flickers in the distance even as the characters struggle to free themselves from their own minds, like the ghostly amber light of the Starling House itself. As the novel progresses, the atmosphere rejects the idea that a haunting is merely sinister. Uncovering the history of Eden becomes a form of reckoning for things long buried, and the eventual growth of beauty over violence and decay.

Where Harrow's writing truly shines is her ability to layer so many ideas and relationships between those ideas, using supernatural elements to explore much larger social questions. Curses represent the inheritance of structural oppression, haunted houses the inheritance of grief, local folklore the inheritance of slantwise histories and truths that refuse to stay buried. Forcing the reader to constantly confront recontextualization means confronting the reality of history and how it gets told, and Harrow's refusal to individualize systemic violence into one evil villain means looking beyond the individual and toward the conditions that produce and empower them.

The true monster of Starling House is not a single entity; it's capitalism and racism and patriarchy and also the people who are complicit in and profit from those systems and also the bloated grief of the people we have lost and also the mutated mechanisms we have created to survive and also the distorted stories that obfuscate reality and also, and also.

Like the wisteria that creeps to overtake that which has long been neglected, the story itself becomes a complex tangle of pain and healing. At its center is the tragedy that uncontrollable circumstances, both systemic and supernatural, have led everyone to keep ledgers of debts that the people who love them never asked them to keep. Layered over that tragedy is the repeated proof that love can break the system entirely, even when it comes out sideways, and even when it's too wrapped up in trauma and thorns to be beautiful.

Starling House brilliantly uses the haunted house setup to ask what it means to inherit a world you didn't make, and whether survival means continuing to fight the battles you've inherited or learning to imagine something beyond them. Harrow challenges her characters, and by extension her readers, to recognize the survival strategies that have been passed down to us, and then to decide what deserves to be carried forward and what can finally be put down.