HekArtemis
Written on Apr 11, 2020
First, the introduction of the character and her life growing up took like half the book. And it was, for the most part, kind of boring. Sometimes I am down for a coming of age story, but not right now, and I wasn't expecting this to half be that, so I wasn't impressed by how long that section took. I think this book would have been better with flashbacks of the past rather than a full half book devoted to her growing up.
Second, near the start she talks about how she and her aunt Lulu meet Dave, he who marries Lulu. He is a photographer. When they meet Eden is a small child, Dave and Lulu are seemingly in their late teens or early twenties.
We went through countless rolls of film in those first months. The shutter flicked incessantly, like Lulu's cigarette lighter when she sat on the balcony in her underwear after photos or sex.
Lulu started telling people what everyone already assumed, that I was their daughter, and Dave adjusted our bodies into exquisite, astounding compositions of intimacy and danger. He laid us out in silks, in drapes, in only skin.
Does anyone else read this the way I do? He adjusts the body of his very young niece into compositions of intimacy and danger. He lays her out in only skin.
That creeped me out a fair bit, it's never addressed and it doesn't go anywhere at all. There is no creepy uncle niece story in here. At least not this uncle and niece.
Third, Eden goes looking into her mothers story and discovers that her mother was 16yo when she gave birth to Eden. She then discovers the identity of her father and it turns out her father was married and in his late 20s or early 30s when he impregnated her mother. This massive age difference is not explicitly noted. See, to me, this is just an adult man having groomed and raped a child, impregnating her in the process. But to the characters it was just a scandal of a man having an affair with a beautiful young thing. No mentions at all of the fact that he has definitely taken advantage of her.
Maybe these are small things to some people, and the presence of these things wouldn't normally bother me - but the fact that they are not addressed at all by the characters, and thus by the author, just turns me off the story. It wouldn't have needed to be a big thing, just an "oh the man was a creep who preyed on children, how horrible, poor mum" would have been nice. Or, "maybe my uncle shouldn't have been taking nude photos of me, it's a bit creepy, is the selling of my nude child photos part of what made us rich? how gross!" But no, not even a line to note the messed-upness of these things.
And beyond all that, the ghost story part of things wasn't that interesting either. I think that maybe there was just too much going on in this story. There is the three sister ghosts. There is the dude trying to shoot Eden. There is the secret of her mother and father. There is the secret of her distant ancestors. There is the secret of some dude who isn't part of the family and just randomly becomes important because she reads a name on a small grave marker. While they all connect together, I think it's not really that well connected, most of it seems kind of irrelevant in the end.
So, yeah. An okay book with an okay story that has a few issues that made it feel kind of bad. I still plan to read more from Cherie Priest, but probably not in this particular series.
