Starling House

• Author: Alix E. Harrow
• Genre: Fantasy
• Publication Date: October 31, 2023
• Publisher: Macmillan Audio

Thank you to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for providing me with an ARC of this audiobook in exchange for an honest review.

A grim and gothic new tale from New York Times bestselling author Alix E. Harrow about a small town haunted by secrets that can’t stay buried and the sinister house that sits at the crossroads of it all.

Eden, Kentucky, is just another dying, bad-luck town, known only for the legend of E. Starling, the reclusive nineteenth-century author and illustrator who wrote The Underland–and disappeared.

Before she vanished, Starling House appeared. But everyone agrees that it’s best to let the uncanny house―and its last lonely heir, Arthur Starling―go to rot. Opal knows better than to mess with haunted houses or brooding men, but an unexpected job offer might be a chance to get her brother out of Eden. Too quickly, though, Starling House starts to feel dangerously like something she’s never had: a home.

As sinister forces converge on Starling House, Opal and Arthur are going to have to make a dire to dig up the buried secrets of the past and confront their own fears, or let Eden be taken over by literal nightmares.

If Opal wants a home, she’ll have to fight for it.

Alix E. Harrow is one of my auto-read authors. While I don’t own any physical copies of her books, I always try my best to get my hands on a copy of her books as soon as possible through my library if I can’t get an ARC. And while NetGalley faked me out with a denial for the digital book, I was fortunate to get approved for the audiobook version. I honestly tried my best to wait to read this one until autumn, but … that was just beyond my control.

To start with, its narrated by Natalie Naudus, who was the perfect person to voice this story. She provides just the right jaded, sarcastic, exhausted with life tone of voice that you’d expect from Opal. 

Opal is 26 years old, and stuck in the polluted, dying town of Eden, Kentucky, raising her younger brother after the death of their mother. He’s got asthma as a result of the pollution from the coal mining that’s been going on for decades, and she’s been focused on trying to get him out of the town for his health. But that’s hard to do working a dead-end minimum wage job, so when Opal is offered a high paying position cleaning the mysterious Starling House for the equally mysterious Arthur Starling, she doesn’t see any choice but to accept.

Once she starts working in Starling House, Opal discovers a lot more than she ever expected to find out. Living in a town full of secrets, belonging to a family full of secrets, learning about the secrets hiding within Starling House, and the dangers lurking within all kept me glued to this story. I couldn’t wait to find out what was going to happen next. Just when I thought I had a handle on the story and where it was going, Harrow would take it in a completely different direction than I expected.

This is the kind of story where the lyrical and beautiful writing transports readers to a magical world where anything can happen. It’s peak Harrow, and I have the same feeling I always do when I finish one of her books—when can I start the next one? This is absolutely one to add to your TBR and it’s the perfect read for Halloween, even if my review is a bit early.