Another home run for Alix E Harrow, though very different to her previous books. I really enjoyed this Southern gothic story about legacy, belonging, and the usefulness (or not) of stories. The romance was also incredibly satisfying- I really like enemies to lovers and this was done particularly well, not skimping on the first stage just to make the second more comfortable. I also liked that the characters COMMUNICATED sometimes and actually made SENSIBLE decisions, which led the story in some really interesting and unexpected directions.

Highly recommended.

Thank you Pan Macmillan, Tor for the digital arc of this book. It was a highly anticipated release for me and being able to read it in advance was so exciting!
This book did not disappoint, as the rest of Alix E. Harrow 'a works.
Full review on my goodreads

No-one in Eden remembers when Starling House was built but they all agree the house and its last heir should go to hell. Stories of the house and owners have been passed down from generation to generation with no-one really knowing the truth. When Opal gets the opportunity to work as a housekeeper for Arthur the owner of Starling House she grabs it with both hands as she's been obsessed with the house since she was a child. But Opal isn't the only one interested in the horrors and secrets of the house and she soon realises if she wants a home and the truth she's going to have to dig down deep and claw her way back to the surface.

This was amazing. A gothic, horrifying and fantastical story with so many beautiful illustrations throughout. Alix E. Harrow has a wonderful imagination this hooked me from the first sentence and kept me gripped throughout. This would make a great autumnal read. I loved how descriptive the writing was making you feel immersed in the story. I highly recommend.

Absolute highlight!

While I do enjoy reading gothic fantasy, I don't do it often and I'm rarely blown away by it, but this book was fantastic.

It's definitely dark and haunting, a perfect autumn read, but I wouldn't classify it as horror. Even the more terrible parts had a certain beauty to them and it was never truly scary. Simply gothic fantasy.

The first half is actually quite slow. I could probably summarise it in a handful of sentences, there is not much happening. But that doesn't stop it from being absolutely amazing. This book lives from Harrow's gorgeous writing style, creating a dark and haunting atmosphere. The House itself is amazing. While the idea is not exactly new, it was so beautifully done. From the very first page it's intriguing, but it took me some time to figure out whether it was good or evil.
The tension builds up slowly, with lots of small hints, hidden secrets and little twists. Dark scenes alternate with some more lighthearted ones, but overall it keeps the dark and mysterious shadow lying over all of it. I couldn't put it down.
The second half of the book was faster paced, with quite a bit of action. There weren't that many surprises to me, but everything fit together and made perfect sense. A very well rounded book.

The characters are also lovely. I could empathise so well with Opal. She is such a wonderful character, very strong and with lots of heart. Her relationships with both Jasper and Arthur were so well developed. I loved the whole sibling-plot and all the love and hope and determination warring with despair and grief. This book is about grief and hate and letting go of the past and I will probably keep thinking about it for a little bit longer.

My heart still aches.
I might be slightly in love with this book.

Thank you, NetGalley and Pan Macmillan for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

A really enjoyable gothic haunted house fiction, I am really enjoying everything Harrow has to offer over the past few years. This was very successful in its creepy, brooding atmosphere that feels stifling at time. I love that for most of the book we are aware that there is something very wrong with the house / its occupant, but we are never truly sure what it is. And when that climax comes I think it was executed very well. A great combination of romance and horror, there were quite strong characters in this book and overall I loved it!

Halloween is fast approaching, and I do love to curl up with a good horror when it comes to my October TBR list! Starling House promises a haunted house thriller, as Opal starts a job for the mysterious Arthur Starling cleaning a house which seems to be almost alive.

I was a little disappointed with Starling House – I was expecting a pacy and supernatural horror from the blurb, but the book is very much a slow burn. The first three quarters could be summed up easily in a few sentences and I never really felt fully invested. The romance angle was too heavily prominent, and Arthur is described so badly on first meeting him that the love element seemed to come out of nowhere. I kept picturing him as an old man which didn’t help, and I still don’t really know how old he was meant to be.

I did really enjoy the ‘character’ of the house itself and I thought that was well depicted. I also like that as a main character, Opal has her fair share of flaws, she makes deals with ‘the wrong people’, steals from everyone and finds it difficult to trust people. There were some elements to the plot that would have so easily been resolved with a conversation, and the fact that this is missing felt like more of a convenience to the story rather than realistic. There were also some plot holes in the later part of the plot which were confusing and left me with questions.

Overall, Starling House is a slow burn – it wasn’t the horror book I was expecting – it’s more of a romance with some atmospheric thriller elements built in. Thank you to Netgalley & Pan Macmillan – Tor Books for the chance to read the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

What can I say about this book? The fact it took me a day to read it says a lot. I didn't want to put it down. My kids had to fend for themselves (don't worry they are more than capable) and the housework was abandoned.
It was page-turning and I just wanted it to jump into my brain so I just knew what was happening.
I did see a couple of the twists coming but I don't see that as a bad thing.
Pick up the book, and if you haven't read her other books then get on it.

The best way I can summarize this book is "what if Casita had a shitty dead-end generational burnout of a job, because capitalist greed is bottomless".

Starling House is marketed as a Southern Gothic with a haunted house, but it isn't made of the same stuff as T. Kingfisher's House with Good Bones, which I finished just recently. Despite being labelled for adult audiences, this book reads more like YA-ish new adult novels. The opening was too dramatically YA, Opal's voiceover of her life was very full of self-descriptors along the lines of how sharp her smiles are and how black her heart, but at the same time, the story picked up nuance and interest in digging into things under these dramatic trappings, and some of it was genuinely compelling. The theme of greed, complicity and exploitation rang consistently and clearly throughout every twist of the story, which I found satisfying. I also enjoyed the cast of support characters -- which I felt were criminally underutilized by the story, especially Jasper -- and I enjoyed the few parts of the book that were narrated from Arthur's point of view, because I found his brand of stubborn patheticness quite endearing.

But as I mentioned, on the matter of style, Alix E. Harrow and I are not very simpatico. The way the book is too earnestly fond of luxuriating in its prose is detrimental to my ability to get lost in the events of it, even when I like to see them unfold. The author's debut (Ten Thousand Doors of January) was much more guilty of this self-indulgence, and the improvement is noticeable, but I feel, not enough. A good metaphor needs some negative space to really unfurl, but if you throw fifty of them within a page, they feel like clutter. I yearned to see the same story told in simpler, starker language, but it's clearly not what the author enjoys doing

My verdict overall is that Starling House is much stronger than the author's debut. But on the matter of style we probably won't ever agree. 3.5 stars rounded up to 4.

Thanks to #Netgalley for an advance copy of the #StarlingHouse

This book, unfortunately, did not satisfy the itch that I was hoping it could scratch.
I was so excited for a fairy tale style, haunted house, Gothic novel to go into the autumn season with.
I found the relationships, particularly between Opal and Jasper, and Opal and Bev to be the most compelling part of this story. I really did enjoy the comfortable and familial relationships in the realistic moments between these characters.
However, I found Opal to be an extremely unlikable character. I found myself rolling my eyes when she told us the reader over and over that she was battle weary, and scared, and liar and a thief, when actually, none of her lies are believed, really, at any point in the novel, and she is constantly acting in the best interests over her brother not herself. I understand that the point of the book is that she is not the person portrayed in her own narrative, but the sacrifice was that Opal's character was unlikable in turn.
The pacing of the book also felt a little off to me, which could be something to do with the exposition that it interjected throughout. Its very clever to weave several narratives around the starling house together in the end, but i found reading each individual's story, which was much like the last but a little different, a tad repetitive.
Finally I found he shift between a first to third person narrative disjointed and distracting.
I also think this story fell more into the fairy tale than the gothic genre. I was expecting a haunted house, and was greeted instead by a sort of house pet (which I actually really loved!!).
In all, I found this book entertaining, and I think there were some great plot twists, it just didn't hit home the way I had hoped it would.

Starling House is everything you want in a gothic horror fantasy novel - dark, nightmarish and super creepy. I haven't read anything from this author before but Alix E.Harrow is now firmly on my auto-buy list!

“It feels like the beginning of a mystery novel, when you’re screaming at the plucky protagonist to run but sort of hoping she doesn’t.” This couldn’t be more accurate!

This is one of those books where the writing and pace is so good you forget you are reading. Not only is it spooky but the imagery is transportive - I felt like I was right there with Opal standing in the house that turned out to be sentient and a character all of it’s own. The house haunts people’s dreams, choosing them as it’s warden and luring them in, existing as a labyrinth was a great aspect. As the pace of the story progresses the pieces of the puzzle start to fit together and you realise that maybe fate had its twisted foot in the door the entire time.

Just phenomenal!!

Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC.

I really enjoyed reading this book. It's the first book I've read by Alix E. Harrow (definitely won't be the last, I'll be adding others to my TBR). My only slight complaint would be that in the first half or so, the pacing was a little slow although I still enjoyed the characters and writing throughout so it didn't really stop my enjoyment of the book.

Just absolutely incredible. We've come to expect so much of Harrow and yet every time she still knocks it out of the park. The characters, the worldbuilding, the tension, the power of her writing - all of it is absolutely masterful. I can't wait to be hand-selling this to people!

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the review copy. This is one of the best books I've read this year. I am a fan of the author's other books but this for me is the best yet. It has the perfect balance of world building, character development and plot. The author manages to build such a rich atmosphere that it practically leaks out of the book. The writing and the pacing flows perfectly. The characters are magnificently written, they are flawed in ways that feel very real. The ending was perfection and I know that I will be thinking about this book for a long time. Recommended for anyone who enjoys dark fairytales/atmospheric/immersive reads

I loved this book! It was my first Alix E Harrow and I will definitely be picking up more from this author. The spooky vibes were immaculate, there was a sentient house (one of my favourite things!).
This was really a book about belonging and loneliness and I thought it handled those topics really well, I teared up a few times. There was also a lot of different representation, Arthur is bi, there’s a lesbian couple, Jasper is black/mixed.
I think this mixture of spooky and whimsy would really appeal to fans of T Kingfisher.

Spooky, gothic fiction, with a fantastic moody house as the 3rd main character.
I enjoyed this but found it lacked a bit of _something_ to make it really memorable. It wasn't quite spooky enough, not quite enough monsters, not quite romantic enough. I'm not sure who the right people to recommend this to are. I enjoyed it, I think I probably need to sit on it a while to figure out precisely who it's for.

A contemporary gothic fairy tale about a small town haunted by the history it can't quite seem to bury and the canny, clever young woman who finds herself drawn to the house that sits at the crossroads of it all. Starling House is odd and ugly and fully of secrets, just like its heir. Opal knows better than to mess with haunted houses or brooding men, but it might be a chance to get her brother out of Eden, and it feels dangerously like something she's never had: a home. But she isn't the only one interested in the house, or the horrors and wonders that lie beneath it. If Opal wants a home, she'll have to fight for it. She'll have to dig up her family's dark past and let herself dream of a brighter future. She'll have to go down, down into Underland, and claw her way back to the light.

A wonderfully dark and mysterious gothic fairytale. The writing was lush while the story flowed so well. The descriptions and atmosphere really made this book so delicious. Loved the prose while the characters were realistic and well rounded. The story was interesting and I found it hard to put down.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this arc