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Thursday, August 11, 2022

#HorrorForLibraries Giveaway 93: Little Eve by Catriona Ward

This week I have a book that already has already proved itself but is now going to be widely available in America. A High-Demand author. I posted my STAR review on the main blog today as well.

More details below, but first a reminder on how to enter: 

  1. You need to be affiliated with an American public library. My rationale behind that is that I will be encouraging you to read these books and share them with patrons. While many of them are advanced reader copies that you cannot add to your collections, if you get the chance to read them, my hope is that you will consider ordering a copy for your library and give away the ARC away as a prize or pass it on to a fellow staff member.
  2. If you are interested in being included in any giveaway at any time, you must email me at zombiegrl75 [at] gmail [dot] com with the subject line "#HorrorForLibraries." In the body of the email all you have to say is that you want to be entered and the name of your library.
  3. Each entry will be considered for EVERY giveaway. Meaning you enter once, and you are entered until you win. I will randomly draw a winner on Fridays sometime after 5pm central. But only entries received by 5pm each week will be considered for that week. I use Random.org and have a member of my family witness the "draw"based off your number in the Google Sheet.
  4. If you win, you are ineligible to win again for 4 weeks; you will have to re-enter after that time to be considered [I have a list of who has won, when, and what title]. However, if you do not win, you carry over into the next week. There is NO NEED to reenter.

Click here to see giveaway 92Our winners were Iggi from Springfield-Greene County [MO] Library District and Tessa from Graves County [KY] Public Library.

I have the next book by Catriona Ward to giveaway. Details on the book itself from RA for All:

STAR REVIEW
Little Eve
Catriona Ward
Oct. 2022. 288p. Tor Nightfire, $27.99 (9781250812650); e-book, $14.99 (9781250812667)
First published August 2022 (Booklist).

Ward is back but this time she presents a proven winner, the American release for her 2018 Shirley Jackson Award winning novel. Readers are whisked away to 1921, to an island, just off the coast of Scotland, with high cliffs and a reclusive family, as Dinah recounts the winter morning when the local butcher found her entire family laid out in ritualistic style, all but her dead. Immediately, Dinah’s sister, Evelyn is identified as the killer, but she has gone missing. Atmospheric from those opening lines, this disquieting story is unveiled through intertwined threads with Dinah narrating the story’s present and Evelyn from 1917. For the first 70 pages, the reader will squirm as the discomfort, characters, and plot slowly emerge, but as the details begin to come into horrifying focus and the time frames begin to converge, it is impossible to look away. And when that inevitable twist comes it is an disturbing gut punch, not because of the shock, but from the deeply unsettling ramifications that ripple out from its center. While its ties to Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle are strong, this psychological horror gem will also appeal to fans of creepy, character driven cult stories like Mr Splitfoot by Hunt and other new, original takes on the traditional Gothic such as Mexican Gothic by Moreanu-Garcia.

Further appeal. Here is a note I took immediately after finishing this book: "An excellent, twisty, Gothic but Ward excels at how she unfolds the "truth for the reader." The "past" of the story [1917 and forward] and the "present" [1921 and forward]  slowly converge with two perspectives: Dinah and Evelyn. And of course there is a twist, this is a Ward novel. But it is not the twist that is the gut punch, it is the emotional, gut wrenching ramification that ripple out from the center of the twist that makes this a STAR review." 


This book was deeply unsettling. It took a little to get into it, to get the background details and the voices of the two narratives and to get settled into the place, but once I did, I could not stop reading.


Again, the "twist" is there, but that alone wasn't why it is good. What the twist as meant over the decades tat followed the main action, that is where the story has its emotional center. 


Three Words That Describe This Book: dual time frames, Gothic, atmospheric.


Readalikes: The three above in the review plus, The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks, Gather the Daughters by Jennie Melamed, The Death of Jane Lawrence by Caitlin Starling, A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay and really any Shirley Jackson nominee or winner. It is one of my favorite awards to use as a readalike resource. 


My ARC is going to one lucky winner, courtesy of Tor Nightfire.


Remember, you enter once and you are entered going forward. I have big tittles coming every week!

1 comment:

  1. Thank you! I read "Little Eve" in two days... you were right, once I got into the rhythm of the storytelling, I could not put it down. This was a good, creepy, twisty story.

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