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I still love Alix Harrow! Starling House has been much anticipated, and I think it fits neatly into her body of work, combining fantasy and whimsy with darkness and grit, as well as romance and a touch of sweet, but not so much that you don’t still feel the hard bite underneath. This protagonist reminds me quite a bit of Chuck Wendig’s Miriam Black; she’s hard-edged and a resolute loner, even though her heart is much softer than she’ll allow. She’s rough and dirty and antisocial, damaged but so strong.

I’m a cheat and a liar, a trickster and a tale-teller, a girl born on the ugly underside of everything. I’m nobody, just like my mother before me.

Her name is Opal. No last name, or whichever one she’s chosen for herself in the moment, like her mother before her. Her mother died when Opal was fifteen, and she’s been parenting her little brother–who was only five–ever since. Jasper is her only priority in life.

I’m a high-school dropout with a part-time job at Tractor Supply, bad teeth, and a brother who deserves better than this dead-end bad-luck bullshit town… People like me have to make two lists: what they need and what they want. You keep the first list short, if you’re smart, and you burn the second one. Mom never got the trick of it–she was always wanting and striving, longing and lusting and craving right up until she wasn’t–but I’m a quick learner. I have one list, with one thing on it, and it keeps me plenty busy.

Jasper is smart and talented, and his debilitating asthma is a bad match for the coal town of Eden, Kentucky. Opal is determined to get him out.

But she is distracted by the magnetic pull of the Starling House, a mysterious old haunted mansion that you can’t see from the road, but this doesn’t stop Opal from dreaming about it. One day she just sort of allows her body to take her there, and she meets its latest enigma of an owner/resident: Arthur Starling, an unkempt, haunted man about her own age. They both know Opal should steer clear of the House, but the House has a consciousness of its own, and once the seal has been cracked–contact made–her life is irrevocably intertwined with Arthur’s, and the House itself, and its weird and inexplicable history. The Starling House, it seems increasingly clear, is all bound up with the town of Eden and the terrible bad luck and sin and crime and hopelessness that Opal wants so badly to free Jasper from.

This is a novel that focuses on place, history, what it means to belong, to stay or to leave, and the meaning of home. Eden’s history includes coal mining, slavery, exploitation, and class divisions. The Starling family has been around for generations, and their role is ever-changing and unclear; the Gravely family has been around just as long, and they are the wealthy coal and power magnates, handing out favors around town or made of pure evil, depending on your perspective. There are a host of other compelling characters, including a loveable motel owner and an even more loveable librarian and a country cop who, again, falls somewhere between doofy and evil. I quite like Jasper, too. Harrow is good with characters, although not all of these are equally well developed.

So, a strong sense of place and a big role for place to play in the narrative. Great characters, with cleverness and snark and grit. And an emphasis on the power of storytelling, and questions about story versus history. “I told myself that writing down somebody else’s story wasn’t as bad as making up my own, the way repeating a lie isn’t as bad as telling one.” “I know that part of the story must be made up, because there’s no such thing as curses or cracks in the world, but maybe that’s all a good ghost story is: a way of handing out consequences to the people who never got them in real life.” “I saw this old map of the Mississippi once. The cartographer drew the river as it actually is, but he also drew all the previous routes and channels the river had taken over the last thousand years. The result was a mess of lines and labels, a tangle of rivers that no longer existed except for the faint scars they left behind. It was difficult to make out the true shape of the river beneath the weight of its own ghosts… That’s how the history of Starling House feels to me now, like a story told so many times the truth is obscured, caught only in slantwise glimpses. Maybe that’s how every history is.”

Finally, at the heart of Starling House is a mystery about power dynamics and the very nature of reality–as well as monsters, imagination, dreams and hopes and hopelessness, family, connections and home, and even romance. It’s a wild ride of a good time. I’m enchanted.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: Appalachia, fantasy, romance, storytelling |