Starling House

Just like everything Alix E. Harrow writes, this book is filled with magic, torment, struggle, redemption, and a keen love of books and the written word. Although Starling House is not as immersively wonderful as her other books, it’s still an absorbing read that brings you into a rough, real, and very strange place. Basically it’s a haunted house story, but the ghosts have history and impact and the main characters, while fated to be where they are, fight and learn and stuggle and come out better in the end.

The titular character in this book is, in fact, a house, and it has quite the personality! With hidden passages, winding halls, and secrets beneath the floorboards, this mansion is the perfect backdrop to a haunting tale about magic and legacy.

I loved the tales within tales that Alix E. Harrow wove inside the narrative: this book is a Southern Gothic classic for the 21st century.

First of all, I love all of Alix E. Harrow’s books. They have strong female protagonists who push back against the hands that they’re dealt.

This book is, at its core, the tale of a haunted house, but it’s so much more than that. There is love and death and class warfare and sentiment and harsh reality, all intertwined in the breathing soul of a house with something to prove, someone to protect, a lineage to honor.

Like all of Harrow’s works, there’s magic in the mundane, and she brings the dead-end town in Appalachia to pulsing life despite the… show more.