In 1816, Halifax, Nova Scotia (shout out to my hometown!) Emeline Fitzpatrick is a young woman in a pickle. A scandalous pickle. She’s fallen in love with a lieutenant in the British Navy, but he hasn’t proposed, and her guardians have set their sights higher for her marriage prospects. Instead of living her dream of sailing away to Bermuda with her beau, Emeline instead gets caught alone with them, and this results in her getting sent down the South Shore of Nova Scotia to be married toff to Captain Graves. Who is not only a Captain but also owns his own small island, where his home Faraday House is located. Emeline will also be the third wife, as Captain Grave’s previous two wives have died.
Except when Emeline arrives at the very creepy, very foreboding Faraday House, she finds out Captain Gaves’s second wife is – not dead. Or not dead yet. While Georgina Graves lingers on death’s door, Emeline tries to find her place in Faraday House while dealing with the house’s not exactly welcoming staff, the somewhat prickly but also very handsome Acadian reverend, and the very mysterious goings-on in Faraday House. Emeline is warned, after all, that in Faraday House, the wives die young.
Yes, this book has a very gohtic style, a creepy house (complete with a sealed off tower and widows walk), a young wife (or wife to be) a dead wife, a on her deathbed wife, a cold husband to be, an alleged curse and alleged ghosts. What really drew me to it personally was it was a historical gothic style haunted (?) house story complete with mystery, set in my own province. Not the part of the province that I am from, but it was neat to have the story start out in Halifax, and I could imagine where Faraday House would be located.
Emeline very much feels in the mold of a gothic heroine, she’s gone through a fair bit before she ges to Faraday House (her parents have both died, and she’s left in the care of distant and cold guardians), and she’s got some serious trauma relating to her mothers death that is explored as the book goes on. I did sometimes want to reach into the pages and slap her, she is prone to daydreaming and coming up with fantastic scenarios to distract her from what is going on. Which I mean – fair, she’s going through some trauma, but I was also like, “find out what is causing that piano to keep playing Emeline, something is up!”
While Captain Graves is the husband to be, the leading male character is the Reverand Pellerine. He can also be moody and has some mood swings, but I liked that he was Acadian and that the Acadian Explusion (Wiki link for those interested!) was worked into his backstory and helped explain some of the strain between him and some of the other characters.
The atmosphere throughout the book is creepy, and everything felt a bit off. And that was not just because the second wife of Faraday House was slowly dying, while the third wife has to just sort of -hang out waiting for her to die before she can marry the Captain. The characters’ interactions with Emeline were at times all over the place with them being friendly, and the menacing or distant and then menacing …. As a reader, I didn’t know how Emeline should be trusting and could understand the character’s confusion.
The book had some twists – some that I saw coming and some that I very much did not. But that speaks a lot to me. I hardly ever see twists coming, and I was here for the vibes in this book. But one (in retrospect obvious) twist made me put the book down and gasp out loud, “Oh so [spoilers spoilers spoilers!].”, The book has that kind of dramatic sense to it for me, like the revelation felt like it needed my kind of outsized reaction.
Overall, I did enjoy the novel. I came for the “hey, it is a kind of a local setting” and stayed for the “Super creepy haunted house” vibes. No, the haunting-ly creepy things that happened didn’t reinvent the haunted house genre, but they didn’t need to. Creepy noises, visions and books falling off the shelf are classic haunts for a reason! And for those that need to know such things (like me), there is a dog(a big old Newfoundland dog!), and he is okay. The dog makes it through okay.