Starling House
A Reese's Book Club Pick
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4.0 • 398 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER | A REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK
“This book has everything you could possibly want this fall...a cursed town, a haunted house, a vivid & eerie setting—plus, characters willing to risk everything.” —Reese Witherspoon (Reese’s Book Club October ’23 Pick)
Starling House is a gorgeous, modern gothic fantasy from the New York Times bestselling author of The Ten Thousand Doors of January.
I dream sometimes about a house I’ve never seen….
Opal is a lot of things—orphan, high school dropout, full-time cynic and part-time cashier—but above all, she's determined to find a better life for her younger brother Jasper. One that gets them out of Eden, Kentucky, a town remarkable for only two things: bad luck and E. Starling, the reclusive nineteenth century author of The Underland, who disappeared over a hundred years ago.
All she left behind were dark rumors—and her home. Everyone agrees that it’s best to ignore the uncanny mansion and its misanthropic heir, Arthur. Almost everyone, anyway.
I should be scared, but in the dream I don’t hesitate.
Opal has been obsessed with The Underland since she was a child. When she gets the chance to step inside Starling House—and make some extra cash for her brother's escape fund—she can't resist.
But sinister forces are digging deeper into the buried secrets of Starling House, and Arthur’s own nightmares have become far too real. As Eden itself seems to be drowning in its own ghosts, Opal realizes that she might finally have found a reason to stick around.
In my dream, I’m home.
And now she’ll have to fight.
Welcome to Starling House: enter, if you dare.
A Book of the Month Club Pick
An October 2023 Indie Next Pick
A LibraryReads October 2023 Hall of Fame Pick
Apple, Best Books of October
EW.com, Fall Book Must Reads 2023
Washington Post, Noteworthy Books for October
Paste Magazine, The Must-Read Fantasy Books of Fall 2023
PopSugar Best New Fantasy Books of 2023
BookPage, Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2023
Observer, Must-Read Books of Fall 2023
Polygon, 12 Best New SFF for the Fall
LitHub, October’s Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books
Bookish, October’s Most-Anticipated Books
Gizmodo, October's Huge List of New Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror Books
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
This supernatural gothic tale revolves around a wonderfully eerie haunted house. Opal is a young woman plagued by recurring dreams of the mysterious Starling House, a mansion that sprouted up with no explanation in the small Kentucky town of Eden during the 19th century. When she comes into contact with the last surviving member of the Starling family, town outcast Arthur, we’re drawn into a scary tale about a family legacy of horror and heartbreak. Hugo Award–winning author Alix E. Harrow’s elegant writing makes Opal’s dreams feel as romantic as they are frightening—we get why the decaying house is so fascinating to her. Starling House is the perfect read when you’re curled up on a dark and windy night.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hugo Award winner Harrow (The Ten Thousand Doors of January) does it again in this tender and triumphant haunted house story. The closest thing to a home that Opal has ever known is the motel room where she lives with her younger brother, Jasper, but she's plagued by mysterious dreams about wandering through Starling House, the most notorious building in the coal-mining town of Eden, Ky., complete with perpetually slamming doors and a light that cuts through the town's thick, rising mist. None of the townsfolk have ever seen the inside save for the unsettling and reclusive Starling family, but in Opal's dreams she knows the interior intimately. She feels called to investigate her connection to the house and the family, but along the way she'll have to determine which secrets she's ready to uncover and who and what she's willing to fight for. Harrow's prose cuts straight to the heart as she melds a story of family legacy and historical oppression with a stirring call to speak the truth. Readers will be left chewing on this tale long after the last page, and Starling House will no doubt take its place alongside fiction's most memorable haunted houses. Correction: An earlier version of this review incorrectly described the protagonist as a teenager.
Customer Reviews
Good ghost story
I can see Reese buying the rights and turning it into a mini-series. One issue I have is that the storyline of the slick folks investigating the paranormal wasn’t fully resolved for me.
Was okay
I didn’t love the story and I didn’t dislike it. I think towards the climactic point of the story it became far too long and the main plot was one that was one cyclical rumination of where the mystical aspects of the house and those in it had received their magic and while it was very imaginative and creative it was a bit too similar to the fantasy/mystery genre’s best selling books.
Wonderful book!
The beginning was a little bleak, but I am so glad I stuck with it. An engrossing tale with a happy ending.