ammaarah
Written on Sep 8, 2020
"It's so easy to judge me on the snippets you have picked from a Vision, when I am the one who carries that whole tapestry?"
I stayed up until 04:30am to read House of Sands and Secrets and I don't regret anything. It feels like ages since I've been entranced by a book. I couldn't stop myself from reading.
The characters are complex and compelling. They are flawed, unlikable and messy, but they're also very human. The characters are explored in depth and their motivations, brightness and darkness are shown through their actions and their way of seeing the world. The story develops naturally and is driven by the characters' actions and choices.
Felicita was a conflicting heroine in When the Sea is Rising Red and I was expecting the same in House of Sand of Secrets. Felicita is still conflicting and she's not a likable heroine, nor is she meant to be, but she's extremely captivating. I was expecting passiveness, repetitive thoughts and whining, but she kept on proving me wrong by calling the shots, taking control of her life and making difficult decisions. She's proud and haughty, keeps people at arm's length and lashes out to protect herself from getting hurt, but she's self-aware and unapologetic, acknowledging her faults and accepting that they're a part of her.
"I am always so sure of the things I can do, because failure would leave me nowhere. I once held a storm of nightmares contained. I can scrape away this little gobbet."
There's also Jannik, Felicita's husband and the mysterious vampire from When the Sea is Rising Red. He surprised me in House of Sand and Secrets, as we get a deeper sense of his character, and I like his wry sense of humour. His relationship with Felicita is flawed, messy and bittersweet, full of understanding, affection and trust, but also tension and miscommunication that drove me up the wall. The direction of their relationship, from a marriage of convenience which slowly burns into something more, is in line with the characters and their nature and I like how it progresses.
Harun and Isidro are a couple that parallels Felicitia and Jannik, a House Lammer and a vampire, and their relationship is also complicated, messy and flawed with equal parts of pain and love. While I usually dislike reading about infidelity, it didn't bother me as much in House of Sand and Secrets because of its placement in the story. The drama that results from the interactions between the two couples are engrossing and the prickly exchanges between Harun and Felicita are entertaining.
The world is still atmospheric, rich and complex and builds on the world that we encountered in When the Sea is Rising Red. MallenIve is a city that's full of luxury and opulence on the surface, but has a dark undercurrent of social inequality, oppression and sexism. Magic is still a huge part of this world and the vampires and their bonds are unique. The political machinations and psychological warfare that plays out is intriguing. I didn't know what direction House of Sand and Secrets was going to take, but I enjoyed the journey and was eager to see where it would lead.
The destination is why I can't give House of Sand and Secrets all the stars. The pacing is good, with the exception of the lead up to the ending, which is confusing, rushed and out-of-place in the overall story. Felicita rushes to House Eline without a plan, while severely injured there's a whole thing going on with the mind houses, the blood bond breaks and Jannik dies. The weirdest part is Yew deciding to help Felicita for reasons that I don't understand when he wasn't even a huge character throughout the story. Then we find out that Jannik isn't dead and the story ends. I feel like House of Sand and Secrets needed an epilogue or something similar, but honestly, I just want to see more of the characters and the world.
Dark, unconventional, complex and utterly compelling!
"My mother discovered soon enough that a son's love is only of the length of a childhood. A daughter's is forever. It may be snarled with resentment, but it goes deeper. Daughters will always eventually understand the mothers they thought they hated."