My featured book for this October is one that I recently read for the Inspy Fiction Reading Challenge Group… The House on Foster Hill by Jaime Jo Wright!
Synopsis: Kaine Prescott’s husband, Danny, died two years ago. The police considered Danny’s death to be an accident, after he was found in his totaled car, his system laced with drugs. Kaine isn’t so sure, though. Danny was a stable husband and definitely not an addict, and the story just doesn’t add up. Weighed down by grief, Kaine needs a fresh start, especially when someone begins moving items and leaving daffodils- normally her favorite flower- in her locked condo. Fearing for her safety and sanity, Kaine leaves her old life behind to start afresh in the Midwest, planning to renovate a dilapidated family home. But before long, it becomes clear the stalker has followed Kaine across country.
A hundred years earlier, Ivy Thorpe- a story keeper for the dead and a woman with her own past baggage- becomes obsessed with solving the mystery of a young woman’s death. Still haunted by her brother’s untimely death and seeing little future for herself, Ivy throws her energy into tracking down the woman’s murderer- even if it might be a fatal mistake. (Goodreads)
My Thoughts: I’d heard the buzz about this book when it released last year and was so happy when I recently got my hands on a copy. And the book didn’t disappoint! It’s a fast read with a nice mix of action and ambiance, alternating between two female POVs- Kaine’s and Ivy’s. With most time-slips, I tend to gravitate toward one viewpoint over the other, and in this case, I connected more with Kaine and her contemporary timeline. Her chapters read faster as a result, but Ivy’s had plenty of intrigue in them, too, and that kept me turning pages.
The character development of both Kaine and Ivy was believable and relatable. Both women struggled with deep wounds- in Kaine’s case, an unacknowledged past trauma and the shocking death of her husband, and in Ivy’s case, the death of her brother and the subsequent loss of her childhood friend and love interest, Joel. Kaine and Ivy both harbor trust issues as a natural result, and these flaws are weighty enough to span the length of the book without being stretched too thin.
The atmosphere is where Wright really excelled in this book, I think. Within a few chapters, she manages to create the feel of a pseudo ghost story, amazingly without any supernatural elements. The historical timeline reminds me of a fairytale (with Ivy’s cold treks in the woods and the mysterious Mr. Foggerty’s bag of furs), with a smattering of Dickens (with the gloomy orphanage that Ivy’s love interest, Joel, grew up in under the leadership of miserly caretaker Mr. Casey) and a pinch of Gothic for good measure (shown in the haunting, spectral-like presence of Myrtle Foster in a painting hung in Foster Hill House). The contemporary storyline reads like proper suspense, building layer upon layer until Kaine’s personal trauma explodes into a more global issue (I’m not giving away spoilers for this one! You’ll just have to read it to find out what I mean.).
Readalikes: If you like The House on Foster Hill, you should definitely try Wright’s other time-slip novels, The Reckoning at Gossamer Pond and The Curse of Misty Wayfair. Skip over to her Amazon Author page to browse!
Keep reading!
Shaen
