karen's Reviews > The Ancestor

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The thought crossed my mind that I should have been a bit more wary before climbing into a helicopter and flying to God knows where without an escape route.

this. this a thousand times.

i used to read a lot of monsterporn because it was so much fun to review, and one of the things that always struck me was how agreeable the human participants always were, how easily they adapted to the situations in which they found themselves; able to go from zero to "i am having sex with two gargoyles" without asking any of the sensible, albethey mood-killing, questions one ought to consider before accepting a foreign object (so VERY foreign) into oneself.

while this book is not monsterporn (view spoiler)[(although it's not NOT monsterporn, either) (hide spoiler)], there's a similar breezy detachment to its heroine, a sort of nonchalance in her decision-making, and her attitude of sitting back and letting events occur as though she's a spectator rather than a participant in all of it might take readers who aren't used to such a laissez-faire gal a minute to adjust.

in order to appreciate this book, which is a perfect rainy-day suspense-fun read, you need to accept that this character operates as a leaf on the breeze, passive and incurious, taking whatever comes her way obligingly.

it's very this

"Okay."

it's all very on brand for traditional gothic lit*—the submissive female who asks zero questions before throwing herself fully into the abyss, in this case jumping on a on a private plane bound for a foreign country the very same day she receives a letter in a language she cannot read telling her about the inheritance of a family she never knew about, and never mind she doesn't have a passport, all will be arranged for her by trust-us strangers and then she's up in the middle of nowhere in an italian castle in the mountains with no way to contact anyone back home and huh, where did my husband go and hmm, has it been a week already up here in isolation and boy, where does the time go?

if you can get on board with that, you will enjoy this—it's a fun book that cleaves pretty closely to the "where you thought it was going" path for a time before abruptly spiking your punch with lsd and taking you...somewhere else, completely off the rails but in the best possible way.

3.5 rounded up because whaaaaaaaaat??


* and not that newfangled victorian gothic you kids are all about these days, with all the wuthering and the stubborn little governesses.


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