Alix E. Harrow has done it again. She is such a skillful writer, and I raced through this book to see discover the answers behind Starling House and see how everything would end. The book is told from dual perspectives. Most of it is first person narration by Opal, a woman in her 20s living in Eden, Kentucky, and trying to keep her and her brother Jasper afloat. Her one and only goal is to get him out of Eden. The second perspective is 3rd person narration from Arthur Starling. There’s a rationale for the different narrative styles that I assumed and had confirmed (mostly) at the end of the book.
There’s a lot of focus on wants vs needs and what we’re willing to sacrifice for others. This can lead to morally gray but understandable behavior by Opal, like lying and stealing. She’s not a Chosen One or a superhero, just a woman trying to get by and willing to do almost anything for Jasper. She’s also delightfully snarky at times. There are some machinations by people associated with a powerful company, and Opal’s decisions in response would have been different if she weren’t leading such a hardscrabble life. There was a place where these machinations got to be too much for me – tonally, it felt too different from the rest of the novel, especially when we ended up in a police station. It brought shady characters into too much light, although I think I recognize the purpose that served, and ultimately it didn’t detract too much from my enjoyment of the novel.
Starling House is sentient, and after the last book I read involving a sentient inn, I’m starting to realize I like that kind of thing. The way the floorboards creak in response to something someone says, a nail working itself out of a board and into a character’s knee when the House is miffed, sunlight following a particular character through the House because it’s feeling cared for. It almost makes the House feel like a pet. There are also fictional footnotes scattered throughout the beginning of the book, which was fun. They dropped off later, and while I didn’t really miss them, I did notice the change.
I didn’t love this book as much as I loved the other two book by Harrow that I read, I think in part because of the involvement of that company and how much I dislike feeling angry at powerful but awful people, but it was still a solid, 4-star read for me. I hadn’t planned to seek out her Fractured Fables novellas, but now I’m not sure I can resist trying to read everything she’s written.