Oof. I hate having to write bad reviews, but I honestly feel like I'm being generous with my 2-star review here.

"Castle of the Cursed" started out fairly strong, but by the 35% mark, I was already considering DNF-ing it (which I very, VERY rarely do), and that feeling only intensified as I kept reading. I trudged on, though, because as an ARC reviewer, I felt like I owed it to the author to see if the story improved before I gave up on it. (Spoiler alert: it did not.)

The plot is super jumpy and disjointed, and the twists feel like they're way out of left field, even for a story that's driven by the supernatural. The characters were flat, the dialogue was unnatural, and the insta-love from multiple characters was just too much for me.

I'm sure this book will find its audience, but sadly, it was not for me.

Well, the author said it was gothic, so: alternate dimensions, blood, curses, cursed castle, castle/garden that lives on blood, family, vampires, vampire prince who falls for teen protagonist, teen protagonist who falls in love with said vampire, mysterious relatives, twins and secret twins, dead twins, twin magic, magic, spells, spellbooks, journals, secret rooms, forbidden parts of the castle, weird foods, early deaths, possession, convoluted plot and "rules," isolated city, weird inhabitants, strange power relationships (did I mention the vampire and the teen protagonist), Spanish lessons, sexual assault, self-harm, attenpted murder, sudden language re-acquisition, fire, trapdoors, towers, tower libraries, teen protagonist who becomes a serial killer (but only of "bad" people), much, much, too much more. The action is forced and poorly paced, the characters are all cut-outs and stereotypes, not everything makes any sense, This feels like it was rushed in the writing and hasn't had any revision or editing yet. Maybe it'll get some of that and become better, but as it is, yikes, what a mess, do not approach vampires, do not take spellbooks, do not pass go, do not read this one.

Castle of the Cursed really hits the mark as a gothic story. There are ghosts, forbidden blood magics, and many secrets within the old castle that has been passed down through one family for hundreds of years. Garber gave a unique spin on narration as she wove in the past and present in unique formats. She unraveled information only the moment it was necessarily, which kept me on my toes. She wrote an interesting main character, and I felt like I was really in the small Spanish town.

One problem I had is with one of the main characters, the "boy" referenced in the synopsis. If he wasn't mentioned as a boy, I never would have guessed it. Very little information was given about his appearance, and he gave off a very strong vibe of being alive much longer than our main heroine has been alive. This wasn't a major deal, but it was still enough that threw me off.

Another problem -- much larger this time -- is the plot. While the first 50% kept me utterly captivated, around 50% it started falling apart a little, and by 60% there was a huge pivot that was very off-putting. It very sudden and out of place, and I didn't necessarily enjoy where the story turned to. It did help answer questions about the plot, but it was just too out-there for me.

I'd recommend this book to anyone who loves a gothic read and stories with huge plot twists. There is no spice, so I'd recommend to any age group. Overall a 3-star read for me.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the eARC!

I was intrigued from the moment I requested this book! The cover is beautiful, and the premise sounded right up my alley.

From the start, I found the book to be a little slow in its development and setup, which is ok, but I ultimately struggled to develop a connection to the characters. I just didn't care about any of them. I think part of the problem was the slow setup considering the short length of the book, and had it been longer, the appropriate character development may have taken place to make me form deeper attachments to Estela and Sebastian.

I had a difficult time wanting to pick this up off my side table, and when I did, my mind was wandering. It fell short of the supernatural ya gothic thriller that I had hoped for, and I'm so sad it just wasn't for me!

From the author of Lobizona comes a great start to a supernatural thriller/mystery perfect for readers who enjoy following a teen character who has lost everything and moves to a completely different environment, usually a haunted or strange mysterious house. In this case, it's an amazing Castle/Mansion in Spain and she is going to learn more about her family's past. The author builds more and more, giving us more twists and information that keep us turning the pages. Vampires included. It has a peculiar vibe that I haven't seen much in recent books and that makes it a compelling read with a bit of love interest. I enjoy this author's style.
Thank you Netgalley and publisher for this e-arc.

Book: Castle of the Cursed
Author: Romina Garber
Rating: 4 Out of 5 Stars

I want to thank the publisher, Wednesday Books, for sending me an ARC. I went back and forth on my rating for this one. I really enjoyed it, but I found the back half not as engaging as the first half. I do get the mixed reviews. In the end, though, I decided that I liked more things about this book than things I did not.

In this one, we follow Estela who has just lost everything. Her parents were the only world that she knew and they had just been killed in an attack. The press and authorities say that it was a gas leak, but it doesn’t make sense to her. If it was a gas leak, then how is she still alive? It is treated as a miracle. She is sent to Spain to live with an aunt who she didn’t know existed. Oh, the aunt has a castle. She finds herself in a country with someone she doesn’t know and doesn’t speak the language. La Sombra, the castle, has its own secrets. There are places that Estela can’t go and there are things that she is not supposed to see. Yet, there they are in front of and she has this sinking feeling that she is the only one who knows they are there. As she gets deeper into the castle, she learns that all families have secrets and that some of them are much darker than what you think.

I loved the setting of this book. I found myself transported right into the mystery and lore of La Sombra. It’s dark. Its gothic. This is not something for marketing, but it’s true. You are taken into this dark and unknown world. Shadows come to life. Blood is needed. Everyone has something to hide. Romina has brought all of this to life. its dark. Plus, I love how the Spanish culture is woven in throughout the story. It adds so much to the atmosphere. There is this sense of sombre and darkness, but there is hope. There is friendships and a bit of romance. Everything is presented in a way that makes the story good. It adds so much to the world.

The plot is very complex, which surprised me. The book isn’t very long and I was not expecting to have so much woven into it. We have Estela who must start over. I thought that was what this book was going to be. It was going to be about her building a life in Spain with some supernatural elements woven it. I was wrong. I liked the direction the book went though. We have the whole moving on thing, friendship, and romance. There are also dark family secrets. We have vampires, shadows, and more. The deeper I got into the book, the more I realized just how much everything made sense. Those little details add so much to the book. The pacing was solid. However, there were times that I felt like there was too much going on and I found myself being pulled out of the story. I noticed this more on the back half of the book, but that’s probably a me thing.

I thought the characters were well done. I have read many young adult books where it felt like certain characters just existed for the sake of having something to move the main characters. I did not get that here. We do have a lot of characters, but it felt like each of them had a role to play in the events and each added something to the book. I also felt like that each character had their own voice and had development that made sense to their goals.

I want to say more about this book, but I feel like I can’t because of spoilers. There are so many things that hooked me here, but there were some things that I did not like as much.

This book comes out on July 30, 2024.

YouTube: https://youtu.be/nAwt5JIGLMA

dnf @ 56%

This book had a lot of promise but unfortunately let me down. The summary made it seem like it would be a YA mystery/thriller set in a gothic mansion with a little bit of supernatural sprinkled in. What I read ended up feeling more like a fantasy towards the end and I was very confused with where the story was going. The characters fell flat for me and the romance made me cringe multiple times. While I wanted to finish this and see how it ends, I found myself wishing it was over so I ultimately decided to dnf.

I was transported into a gothic world in Romina Garber's "Castle of the Cursed". The book is full of creepy gothic goodness, and the twists and turns that had me guessing up until the very end. The story had me so riveted I could not put it down, so I stayed up all night reading!

This was a decent YA gothic romance. I found myself having a very hard time becoming fully immersed into the story of this book. The writing was enjoyable and atmospheric and have off the gothic dark vibes but the story itself was a bit lackluster to me. I enjoyed the paranormal aspect and even the romance despite the somewhat instalove connection but I found myself struggling to finish this book. This is definitely a me problem I believe.

When Estela lost her parents in a freak, unexplained accident aboard a New York subway, she was thrown into a system that pretended to care but was ultimately powerless to do anything to help her. She was an undocumented immigrant, after all, because her father apparently never filed the proper paperwork to change their status. As well, her parents’ claims that they were from Argentina prove to be false. They are actually from Spain, she learns, when the System finds an aunt in the small town of Oscura, Spain and promptly ship her off to that place.

Aunt Beatriz Brálaga is a doctor, living in the run-down ancestral castle named Castilla Brálaga, and she welcomes Estela with the promise of a Spanish tutor, a list of rules (including a specification of absolutely no visitors), and an aloof demeanor. It’s not a loving house Estela has come to.

However, she does find some friendship in the form of Felipe, a tutor whose family owns the town’s bookstore. He is obsessed with the castle and the family who live there, as his own shares some historic ties to them. Through him, she will come to learn many elements of the strange history both of the town of Obscura as well as the castle overlooking it.

While all of this seems nice, normal, and possibly boring, Estela finds herself increasingly involved with an unseen, strange world. Castle Brálaga is home to odd phenomena and a terrible shadow beast, which resembles a man but is not. This last can only be seen by Estrela and threatens to kill her if she will not remove the spell put upon him. Is this bloodthirsty creature real or a creation of her own imagination? And what of the purple room, where she recalls herself playing as a child and possibly being set on fire? What about the death certificate she finds with her name upon it? And what secrets are found in the phrase, “No hay luz in Oscura” (There is no light in the dark)?

Estela is more than up to the task of figuring out these mysteries. The one reliable aspect of her time with her parents is how many lessons she learned from her detective father. He may not have been a police officer in the States as he claimed, but he had the right mind for questioning suspects and witnesses as well as assembling the pieces of a mystery to build a picture and form a solution.

Still, Estela is left with plenty of questions and suspicious circumstances to comb through.

Is she being gaslit or is there something else happening here? Does Castilla Brálaga actually hide a doorway to another world, or is that mere history, hearsay, legend, and lore? And the more she learns, the more she discovers that her parents were lying to her about the past. What else have they withheld, and what secrets await her investigative mind? Romina Garber pens a sly fusion of gothic nightmare, dark fantasy, and psychological horror with Castle of the Cursed.

Gothic horror is a comfort food for me. And a book like this, while not quite as given toward the gothic side as Donyea Coles’ Midnight Rooms as it is the more supernatural terror side of Catherine Cavendish’s Those Who Dwell in Mordenhyrst Hall, is nevertheless an intriguing exploration of those tropes as seen through the eyes of a young woman who has come of age in America returning to Spain and discovering European roots. The gothic elements do not overwhelm the narrative but add an additional layer to an already intriguing stew. In addition to the gothic stuff, Castle of the Cursed contains some romance elements, some paranormal ones, and even a touch of portal fantasy,

Romina Garber uses a first-person perspective for this novel’s narrative, which provides us with both a heightened level of intimacy with the protagonist, but also holds us at arm’s length when we realize that not everything Estela tells us should be taken at face value. The opening prologue and chapters paint our protagonist as a victim, possibly hallucinating, potentially of psychological instability. She flirts with self-harm, she can be brash, her perspective includes elements that don’t seem real for other, objective viewers (mysterious purple smoke is something that comes and goes during the stranger parts of her life). However, she has an inquisitive mind and a natural inclination toward investigation. When posed with a mystery, she cannot help but want to worry it and see it through to the solution.

By its very title, Castle of the Cursed suggests a cast of characters who are reeling from bad historical decisions and suffering from the aftermath of worse choices and greater powers. While this is certainly a castle populated by the cursed, surely, but it is also a cursed location in its own right. The curses involved are not only those applied by witchcraft woven by others but taken on the self by choices made without full awareness of the consequences.

Estela is our entry level point of view character, and the first-person narrative offers us an experience filtered through her own perceptions. She enters the story with heavy doses of guilt and despair, psychological curses she has draped upon her own shoulders without either a support system or an ability to communicate effectively. As the story progresses, she learns of more challengers.

However, the author never lets us lose hope altogether. Instead of a gratuitous delve into despair and a darkness that crushes out all hope of light, Garber’s novel allows light and love to peek through various chinks in the castle and town’s oppressive gloom. We witness redemption, we witness characters struggling to do the right thing even when facing daunting odds, and we see the goodness in some of the most standoffish individuals. As well, we find evil in the antagonists. However, there is no foregone winner in this battle between good and evil.

Readers looking for a layered text, a narrative that weaves together some familiar elements from a variety of subgenres in such a way to make them work together in unexpected ways, will find much to enjoy in Romina Garber’s latest offering.
Readers looking for darker descents in which each step of the journey serves to erode all hope and whittle spirits down to guttering candleflames will probably best be served elsewhere.

Castle of the Cursed is a cleverly constructed gothic horror and fantasy work, which slowly introduces its protagonist to a shadowy realm of dark magic, dread, and wonder. The elements are there from the beginning, but the author enjoys teasing the reader with questions of reliability. Through a first-person perspective, a history of instability, and threats that only she can see, we are never quite sure whether to commit to Estela’s story fully. However, the prose is seductive, inviting us to shed our rational world and dive deeply into a wholly irrational one. With a twisty plot built on paranoia and instability, Castle of the Cursed offers its readers a chance to enjoy supernatural wonders and psychological complexity.
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A special thank you to NetGalley and Wednesday Books for providing an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

A spellbinding gothic romance with a web of mystery, supernatural allure, and shadowed secrets. It is atmospheric and dripping with suspense..
Many thanks to St. Martin’s Press and to Netgalley for providing me with a galley in exchange for my honest opinion.

Fantastic gothic adventure! Be prepared to laugh, cry, and experience rage with Estela during her adventure.

Estela experiences the horrible tragedy of the death of her family, before eventually moving to a remote Spanish castle with an estranged aunt. Nothing Estela knew before could prepare her for the wild ride her life has become.

I lost many hours of sleep because I could not put this book down. Before I even finished the book, I was suggesting it to many friends and families. Cannot recommend this book enough for lovers of fantasy, adventure, and the macabre.

I loved the story, the world building and meeting the different characters. I felt completely immersed in the story and couldn't stop reading it.

I received an ARC copy of Castle of the Cursed from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

As someone who has Jane Eyre in her pantheon of favorite books - the promise of a gothic romance drew me to Ms. Garber's Castle of the Cursed. In style, it features many of the features of a gothic novel with broodish male characters, confusing/forgettable characters, and convoluted and shielded motivations. The execution of the gothic style is solid.

However, the twists and turns of the novel make the worldbuilding choppy and interwoven into the twists of the storyline. The setting is as much part of the storyline, but the text itself becomes dizzying and scattered. Garber contends with strong themes by addressing grief, responsibility and feelings of abandonment, but the incorporation of love feels rushed and disjointed.

I enjoyed the cultural aspects of the some of the tale, but the elements of Spanish culture felt like more of the foreground than the cultural makeup of the characters or the ties that bind them.

This novel started out a bit slow, but I was interested, so I kept reading. However, the further this book went on, the more of a mess it became. I saw another reviewer say the narrative felt like a fever dream, which I'd have to agree with. The romance was way too rushed and felt quite immature. This also felt like a book where too many ideas tried to be incorporated, but they all felt too jumbled when they came together.

Castle of the cursed

I received this book from NetGalley for an honest review. 

This book wasn’t what I was expecting at all… in a good way.

Estela loses her parents in a train accident, she was the only survivor. She later finds that she has an aunt in Spain, that’s where this story begins.

Once in Spain Estela finds out that her parents weren’t honest with her and she wants to find out why. She embarks on a journey of magic, betrayal, love, and loss.

What is really happening in Oscuro? Read this book to find out.

This book was good, if a little too long. Which is a weird thing to say when I wanted to spend more time on the town and the lore (which was very confusing). It has elements of Mexican Gothic and ofcourse the enemies to lovers thing happening. The twist was well played but felt a bit muddled with everything else happening.

2.5 stars.

What would you do if you survived a tragic event and was forced to live with estranged family in the ancestral castle that was being haunted by a vampire only you can see? You would probably think you are as crazy as Estela feels.

After a subway accident, Estela is sent to live with her aunt in Spain at La Sombre, a castle that has been passed down in her family for generation after generation. Estela does not know Spanish, nor the village history, so her aunt sets up Spanish lessons with Felipe, the son of the local bookstore owner to help her acclimate. There Estela learns that besides being the mayor, Estela's aunt runs the village clinic, where the villagers donate blood for free health care. Cue the spooky music and the vampire ghost. Estela is visited by the ghost of Sebastian from dusk to dawn. Is he a real ghost or a made up figment of her imagination brought on by the trauma of the subway accident or the interdimensional being he claims to be? Estela also finds several secret passages and hidden rooms that prove that something mysterious is going on in the castle. When her aunt goes away hurriedly for a medical convention, Estela meets her uncle, Teo. He knows more than he lets on about the castle and the mysteries that it holds. Will Estela be able to solve the mystery before she either goes insane or falls victim to the castle's terrifying legends?

Absolutely loved this book!!! It started as a tragic mystery, almost Dracula-esque, then twisted into a gothic romance, reminiscent of Warm Bodies with some sci-fi interdimensional traveling. I went in to reading this blindly, without reading any reviews or blurbs, and I'm so glad that I did. Estela is a strong female character without being whiny, even after all she is put through. The sexual tension between her and Sebastian builds without being smutty. La Sombre is a character in it's own right, growing as the reader learns more about it, both past and present. Garber did a wonderful job of weaving all of the multi-generational storylines together in a fluid form that leaves the reader wanting to know the answers to all of the mysteries. Could definitely see this made into a movie!!

Many thanks to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press/ Wednesday Books for sharing this digital reviewer copy with me in exchange for my honest opinions.

Content Warning: violence, kidnapping, death, loss of a parent, depression, grief

+ The gothic vibes in this book is nice. Estela moves in with her estranged aunt who lives in a Spanish castle called la Sombra. It’s dark, it’s falling apart, it’s old and she feels like someone is watching her. The town around la Sombra, feeds into the lore of the castle and the families that have lived there, almost like they are the rulers of the town. Estela learns about her family’s dark past and I thought where the story took me was quite unexpected.

+ Estela feels like an unreliable narrator at first because things that have happened in her life without a normal explanation. Also, because of her parents death – she’s being treated for PTSD and she doesn’t at times trust her own memories so I thought that made more engaged in the story because I didn’t know where it would be heading. I thought her growth and journey was strong though.

+ I did like the twists in the story, especially the ones I wasn’t expecting. There is a whole theme of family in this story that I thought was done well, especially when it’s about family secrets and there is a lot that Estela uncovers about her family, good and bad.

~ There is a paranormal romance in this story. Sebastián is a dark presence in the castle that is trapped and only Estela can see him. She finds out that he’s a vampire which even more fantastic given the gothic atmosphere of the book and I love paranormal romance. But I didn’t love the romance in this one. I didn’t feel the chemistry between them, even though there were heated moments, it fell kind of flat to me. It’s a bit too insta-love for me especially for someone like Estela going through so much trauma. I wish there was more build-up to their attraction.

My Thoughts:

I like how this book took me on an unexpected, twisty, and mysterious journey with Estela who is overcoming some difficult things like grief and trauma. I thought the gothic vibes were great and la Sombra was definitely creepy but I felt like I needed more from the story and wish the romance wasn’t so insta-love.

Thank you to Netgalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review!!!

This book was so good. It took me a minute to get into it, but after the first like two chapters I was absolutely hooked. I wanted to know what was going on in the castle that Estela was living in, why her aunt was acting the way she was, and what the heck was going on with Sebastian! The history of the town that Estela lived in after the accident involving her parents was well thought out and I really liked uncovering what was happening and learning along with Estela. It was a creepy vibe throughout the book that I was absolutely here for, it kept me on my toes the whole time and gave me the same feeling as watching a good horror movie. The twist towards the end? Absolutely killer. And then the last word of the book? I’m dying over that, and for my own peace and sanity I have decided not to read too much into it (after I went back and reread a certain scene like three times to try and make sure I knew what had actually happened).

I absolutely would recommend this book to anyone who likes romance, suspense, mystery, etc. because it had it all and it was such a fun and entrancing read!