Uncomfortable read about a young woman who believes she is responsible for her mother's death because it occurred during childbirth. However, the mother is still alive "inside" of her and the only way to stop her mother's voice is to self-mutilate herself. Meanwhile, her father hates her and is trying to marry her off to get her out of his life. The writing is good but the mutilation is just too gross and the character of the daughter and father are completely unlikable. It was a relief when the book was done.

Pohlig creates a very different take on the Victorian ghost story. Iseult, a young woman of good breeding who is approaching the age of settled spinsterhood, is dressed in mourning for her mother and has been for her entire life. Her mother died shortly after her birth, and her father has never forgiven Iseult. He means to marry her off so he will be free of her, presenting unsuitable candidates in a seemingly unending parade. But Iseult has no intention of marrying anyone. Iseult is haunted by her mother in a very peculiar way; she believes her mother is living inside her in the scar on her neck, acquired during her difficult birth. Finally, Iseult is presented with a suitable suitor in the person of Jacob who has his own peculiar affliction, silver skin caused by some medical treatments. Iseult tries to reconcile her feelings for Jacob with her self loathing and her possession by her mother, pushing her into a state that promises disastrous results.

Partly historical fiction, partly a ghost story, Pohlig's novel is an interesting fictional concoction, with some disturbing self mutilation and madness mixed in for good measure. Readers who love Victorian fiction will relish this novel.

This book just got too bizarre and gruesome for me. The protagonist wasn’t likable enough for me to continue to read and the story didn’t feel believable.

3-4 stars. This was a good book, which was well written and characters developed flawlessly. With that said, I’ll say that it had some subject manner many might not like, borders a bit dark, so if it’s not your thing you will not enjoy. It was definitely creepy, but also strange, but overall I greatly enjoyed it. Will make sure I recommend to others.
I will make sure I buzz it around!

Whee! This was weird and super gross and also kind of hilarious in a way that made me feel a little guilty for laughing yet unable to stop myself.

Labeling this book gothic horror is a bit misleading. It’s a good deal more visceral than standard gothic. Stabbing oneself in the neck with sewing scissors is a good deal more, um, modern in its brand of horror than the typical Creepy Thing Stalking Around in Attic motif of the genre.

Still, that’s a publisher’s error, as I don’t think the author intend to write a straight gothic horror novel, but rather to play on the tropes of the genre to put together something more unique.

Weird and oft icky as this was, I enjoyed it and found the slightly wry tone to be an amusing counterbalance to the gory breed of violence involved.

Fair warning: I didn’t find the violence in this to be of an upsetting nature, but I don’t recommend this book if you have a self harm trigger, as some form of it takes place in nearly every chapter.

Unsuitable is much more than suitable. It is a well-written book with a hint of alluring wit. Iseult, the lead character, drew me in and held my interest. The author made me care about Iseult. I wanted her to succeed, to overcome her pessimism, and to end her intensely self-destructive ways. I wanted to reach into the pages of the book to hug her, hold her, and make her stop hurting herself. Her father was a different story. With characters so expertly portrayed that they evoke feelings of attachment, repulsion, and care, the author crafts an interesting read. But the family in Unsuitable is so dysfunctional as to become supernaturally strange. Unsuitable is summed up as one big weird, woeful tale.

This book was very different from most that I have read. Every time I wanted to stop reading something made me continue.
I’m glad that I did.
Many times throughout the story, my heart ached for Iseult but at the same time, I was tickled by the way the author wrote her sense of dark humor.
This was a very interesting read, and I look forward to reading more from the author!

This was a very strange and sad book. It was interesting, well-written, and thought-provoking, but I don’t know that I would necessarily recommend it to anyone unless I knew they were into dark psychologically challenging books. I didn’t really enjoy reading it but acknowledged while I was reading it that it was a good book. I was leaning toward 3 stars but ended up giving it 4 due to the writing.

I received a complimentary ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

First off, if you are sensitive to self-harm, suicidal thoughts or actions, or blood in your books, this isn’t the one for you.

I’m fine with reading about all of that business, so I just kinda went for it.

Iseult is a fairly interesting, although not particularly complex character. All of her motivations are pretty self-explanatory, so I didn’t have to do a lot of logic-leaping. She believes that her dead mother resides within a scar in her shoulder, and that she speaks to her. Sometimes so forcefully that it shuts out everything else. And her mother isn’t all that nice. Like, she can be quite cruel – she even physically assaults Iseult from inside her own body. Is she real? Is Iseult just imagining her out of some sense of misplaced guilt over her mother’s death? Does it really matter? For the purposes of this story, it doesn’t really. What I found so interesting about Iseult isn’t her inner mon(m)ologues (the style in which those were written was actually really off-putting, imo), it’s that she has a surprising amount of depth. She isn’t just the sum of her loveless relationships, her guilt, or her self-harm. She still clearly just wants to be loved – by her mother, by her father, by anyone really, but she’s so entrenched in her own self-abuse (and her inner mother/monologue’s abuse) that she can’t hold onto the reality that she is loved by Mrs. Pennington, at the very least. She can’t hold onto any real happiness or positive feelings because her mother/”mother” won’t allow her to.

It’s an interesting enough story. I wish that there had been a little bit more tension placed on Iseult’s internal battle with her mother. I mean, there was certainly some, but I feel like in order to truly justify that ending (which, in spite of the fact that it wasn’t particularly surprising, was nonetheless shocking in how it all played out), it would have been helpful to have just a little bit more meat to the fighting.

The Unsuitable by Molly Pohlig was a wonderfully creepy read for the Halloween season. While there are not a lot of events in the book, there is a never-ending battle going on between the main character and the dead mother she hears in her thoughts at all times. I was compelled from the very first chapter to find out the truth and, for all the main character's faults, I was rooting for her to find some sort of happiness.

The ending was a little rushed and unhappy for my taste and there were plenty of grammatical/spelling issues in the ARC that I hope do not carry over into the final copy.

Overall though, if you like creepy reads with unreliable narrators based in the 19th century, this is absolutely the book for you.

Major trigger warning for self-harm and suicide though.

A unique story —moody, gothic, gruesome at times, with a sad kind of bleakness throughout. Will make you so glad you weren't alive during Victorian times...

I’ve just read a book about a girl who believes her dead mother lives in the scar on her neck. And I liked it.
Most definitely a page turner, this one starts off weird. It finishes weird, too, but you’ve got the sense of and embrace the weird well before then. I liked the characters. Iseult, Mrs. Pennington, Jacob. As troubled as she was, I was rooting for Iseult and was intrigued by her plight.
I’m glad to have had the opportunity to read a copy before its release and recommend it.

And now someone please tell me how to pronounce Iseult as they would in Surry?

This is the story of Iselut Wince. A 20 something year old in the Victorian times whose father seeks to find a proper suitor for her.

Just a couple of issues.

She’s 28 so nun age in those times, her father despises her to the point he can’t even look at her, and Iselut’s dead mother lives inside her body.

Yes.

Quite.

Right inside the scar tissue of her neck and Iselut communicates with her quite frequently.

Such a happy home. A normal little family.

So you see, because of Iseleut’s mother living inside of her and her talking to and then fighting quite a bit this tends to cause issues…People talk and talk leads to rumors and who would want a woman who believes she’s inhabited by a dead corpse married into their family?

Desperate to get his crazed daughter out if his house, Mr. Wince has one last resort. He introduces Iselut to a man with silver skin. It is then that Iselut begins to experience something other than obedience for the voice in her head and learns about herself and her own family’s dark past.

Obviously, this book is dark. Very, very dark. The main character is literally cutting into her neck every other chapter and it pains me to write that and it pains me to read it. There is a reason why she does it but it does not make it any less unpleasant.


I honestly found the emotional treatment of her so much worse. It hurt to see it happen to her. She did absolutely nothing wrong. Yes, she was odd. Yes, she talked to herself but did she deserve this foul treatment. Not at all. I felt that deeply because I’m at this point in my depression where I feel so on the edge that anything could tip me over so at huge moments in the book I had to take deep breaths and walk away.

This all played out like a dark fairy tale and read very much like the Brothers Grimm. I’m still sick so I’m not even going to try to go deep diving for some profound meaning or vision but I’m sure there are many! What I got from it mainly was:
Be kind to others.
Be kind as life is way too harsh and too short already.
You never know what anybody has gone through so why make it that much harder.

There were some confusing bits in the book. The disjointed voices especially between Iselut and her mother. The pacing was a bit slow in the beginning as well. But overall I enjoyed this read. I wish we got to know more about the other characters besides Iselut and her repulsive father. I really enjoyed the cover! It’s cool! Look at those big Clock Tower esque scissors!

This was dark through and through and there was no light but sometimes that’s just how life is. Dark and unforgiving. Grim, a reminder that we don’t always have to listen to that little voice inside of us. Or maybe sometimes we could strain to hear a little bit better.

Thank you very much to Netgalley and the publisher for this ARC. All opinions are my own.

Gothic eerie literary fiction at its best.Dark dark dark shocks around every corner.A first novel a new author to be followed.grab this book.#netgalley #henryholt

Iseult Wince, 28 and very nearly a spinster, lives in mourning clothes for her mother Beatrice who died giving birth to Iseult. Essentially an orphan in her own home, she lives with her cold, preoccupied father, her sole companion the housekeeper. Plus Beatrice, who lives in the swollen scar on Iseult's neck. Despite her age and her peculiar manners, her father does not give up trying to foist her off on various would-be suitors. To date, Iseult - with her mother's help - has driven them all off.
Beatrice might be gone but she certainly isn't forgotten: She never stops talking. Awake or asleep, Iseult has the drone of her dead mother's voice in her ears, often drowning out the dinner table conversations and often drowning out Iseult's own thoughts.
When her father finally brings s suitor who will take her on, a chain of seemingly minor events is set into motion, culminating in a catastrophic father-daughter interview that changes both Iseult's past and her future.
Creepily atmospheric and at times graphically gruesome, The Unsuitable is also slyly funny. The mother-daughter dynamic is a psychological study in what appears to be disappointed love as well as selfishness and cruelty. The denouement is gothically graphic.
Initially, the format the author chose tempted me to stop reading, but a dozen pages in I couldn't put it down.

.

For me, this book was a bit of a let down. Although I enjoyed the synopsis which is the reason for my requesting of this title, the characters were a bit flat and one dimensional. There wasn't much development for them. Her father was always a jerk and Iseult was always obsessed with the her mother in her neck even though she tried to silence her multiple times. I'm not really sure there was much time to connect with the characters either since it is a very short book and maybe should have been just a novella.

The plot was unique but it didn't pull me in. I found it to be sluggish and there was a lot about Iseult cutting herself. That was one thing I could have done without. As for the plot twists, only one actually surprised me and the ending was lackluster. It was obvious where the story was going.

Overall, I just don't think I was the right audience for this one. I feel like others will enjoy it more than I did.

Pitch black and twisted into knots. I couldn’t wait to race to the end and learn Iseult’s fate. Whenever a sliver of hope would creep in, Pohlig quickly shot it down. Masterful and spooky, a great read.

An effective gothic story with an unsettling atmosphere that evokes the works of Shirley Jackson. But this is no imitation; the author has a wholly original story and her unique voice is an exciting new voice in literary fiction. I will definitely read future books by this writer.

This is a story about a young woman whose mother lives in her neck. That’s actually how the author herself pithily described the book in her afterword. But, obviously, there’s more to the story than that. The thing is, though, not that much more. In fact, it probably would have made a much more potent short story or a novella. On the novel canvas, it seems somewhat stretched out quite thin. The young woman does indeed have her mother with her at all times as it were in a most unusual fashion of a voice emanating from a childhood collarbone injury, resulting in, quite literally insults added to injury. To deal with both the young woman frequently resorts to self mutilation.There isn’t much she can do otherwise, for these is a proper gothic novel, wherein the ladies are delicate and fairly useless and are treated as such. At 28, Iseult is nearly a spinster, considered too odd by many and combined with natural pickiness, she has no one in her life but a distant, emotionally abusive father and a kindhearted servant. The catalyst for the novel comes when a plausible suitor is finally found, a lovely young man with silver skin. Yes, silver skin, because, you know, disembodied voices of long dead mothers aren’t enough. So the wedding plans are on the way, the drama gets heightened as changes are wont to do and once the family secrets start getting revealed, it’s curtains. Morbid ending as expected. Interesting novel, but didn’t quite work for me. Took a while to get into, the first chapter is actually fairly offputting in the same way incessant disembodied voices can be. The dead mother is no delight, but then again neither is Isuelt herself and that’s much more significant, because the entire novel rests on her delicate lady shoulders. In fact, the only genuinely likeable character is the silver skinned suitor. The story seemed quite thin somehow, not enough meat, mostly bones…then again that’s pretty appropriate for a gothic genre. Some things worked well, the atmosphere held up nicely and the father was as evil and horrid as an evil horrid father figure can be. The writing was quite good. The pacing, once you get used to the inner dialogues, sped along nicely. And the ending was very effective. So something of a mixed bag. Fans of gothic fiction should get some enjoyment out of this one. It was a very quick read for the page count, but didn’t quite engage. Some readers, certainly, should find this one more suitable than others. Thanks Netgalley.

In the Victorian era, an unmarried woman is a spinster and a drain on her family. Iseult Wince’s father is determined not to let his daughter languish at home with him so he goes on a search for a potential husband. Iseult is ……unusual, a plain, introverted woman believes her mother, who died in childbirth, lives on in the scar on her neck. She manages to scare off every suitor but one, an equally odd man whose own experiments have turned his skin silver. He’s desperate enough to want to make Iseult his wife, but the bride’s “mother” has something to say about that, and things become increasingly violent and bizarre in this dark and disturbing Gothic