Katie Lumsden

Margaret Lennox is recently widowed and newly hired as the governess at the mysterious Hartwood Hall. She is fond of the young boy whom she's been hired to teach—and yet her new employer is hiding secrets.

The most basic summary of this book makes it clear that it's a pastiche of the Victorian Gothic novel. Yet for a pastiche of the genre written by someone who runs a popular YouTube channel devoted to nineteenth-century literature, this is a strangely passionless addition to the genre. If you'd told me this had been written as a writing exercise by someone who'd read nothing more of Victorian literature than Jane Eyre, I'd have believed you. There's no evident infusion of love for the source material here, and the anachronisms are glaring. The dialogue is the worst, but Katie Lumsden doesn't appear to have a deep grasp of contemporary sensibilities—my eyebrows rose so high at seeing the widow of a Victorian Church of England clergyman tell her young pupil that it's fine and indeed effective to pray for the dead.

That's downright papist of you, Margaret Lennox!

The other elements of the book—pacing, characterisation, relationships, suspense, denouement/reveal—were all at best mediocre-to-competent. Even the Supposedly Dramatic Lesbian Reveal at the end wasn't enough to spark any interest in me, particularly after the fairly dull hetero romance that dominated much of the book.

The Secrets of Hartwood Hall isn't an outright terrible novel, but I don't see much here either for the casual reader of this genre or for the aficionado.… (más)