It took me two months to finish The Girl From Rawblood by Catriona Ward. This book was so tedious and dull that I truly had to make myself keep reading. After reading The Last House on Needless Street, also by Ward, and feeling the same way, I think it’s time to say that this is not an author for me. With that, let’s get into a spoiler free review.
Synopsis:
In 1910, eleven year old Iris Villarca lives with her father at Rawblood, a lonely house on Dartmoor. Iris and her father are the last of their name. The Villarcas always die young, bloodily. Iris knows it’s because of a congenital disease which means she must be strictly isolated. Papa told her so. Forbidden to speak to other children or the servants, denied her one friend, Iris grows up in solitude. But she reads books. And one sunlit autumn day, beside her mother’s grave, she forces the truth from her father. The disease is biologically impossible. A lie, to cover a darker secret.
The Villarcas are haunted, through the generations, by her. She is white, skeletal, covered with scars. Her origins are a mystery but her purpose is clear. When a Villarca marries, when they love, when they have a child – she comes and death follows.
Iris makes her father a promise: to remain alone all her life. But when she’s fifteen, she breaks it. The consequences of her choice are immediate and horrific.
Iris’s story is interwoven with the past, the voices of the dead – Villarcas, taken by her. Iris’s grandmother sets sail from Dover to Italy with a hired companion, to spend her final years in the sun before consumption takes her. Instead she meets betrayal, and a fate worse than death. Iris’s father, his medical career in ruins, conducts unconscionable experiments, to discover how she travels in the Villarca blood. Iris’s mother, pregnant, walks the halls of Rawblood whispering to her, coaxing her to come. As the narratives converge, Iris seeks her out in a confrontation which shatters her past and her reality, revealing the chasm in Iris’s own, fractured identity. Who is she? What does she desire? The answer is more terrible and stranger than Iris could have imagined.
My Thoughts:
- Rating-
This book sounded like the perfect read for the start of fall and spooky season. I love anything Gothic and I especially enjoy stories about haunted families, whether that’s supernatural or mental illness. Ward took this great idea and created a confusing novel that crawls along at a snail’s pace.
I could have tolerated that, though, if the characters weren’t so unbearably boring and flat. The most interesting one of them all is Iris’ mother and she’s only featured in the last half of the book. Speaking of the last half, in it there are many new characters introduced and the story rapidly swaps between their POV’s and timelines. It did make for a more interesting read than the first half but it was disjointed and really pulled me out of the story.
As for the overall mystery (the only reason I kept reading), it’s never clearly solved. Maybe I’m not intelligent enough to grasp it but it’s never explained what terrible thing has haunted the Villarca family for generations. I couldn’t spoil this book for you even if I wanted to because I don’t know.
Final Thoughts:
I’m honestly annoyed that I paid for a physical copy of this book. I’m also annoyed that such a great story idea was so poorly executed. If you have any good Gothic book recommendations, please send them my way. Thanks for reading!
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