Ponder: Starling House

Starling House by Alix E. Harrow ©2023 is an eerie read that I would rate A+ for spooky ambience and C+ for logical plot lines. The characters are well portrayed. The town of Eden, Kentucky is a coal town, familiar in its not atypical rich/poor bifurcation. The wealthy family of Gravely dominates, having earned its money by exploiting labor in the coal mines and disrespecting the poor. Per the front flap of the book

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.

My reasons for the low grade in plot is that the intriguing storyline is revealed gradually throughout the course of the book as more information is disclosed. This lack of transparency made it difficult for me to see where the story was going. Even at the end, I was unclear on where it had been. But I was enjoying the suspense of the spooky ride.

Another dominant family name in the book is Starling. A house that is passed down through the generations of Starlings has a life of its own, morphing similarly to the Halls of Hogwarts in Harry Potter. The house has favorites. It likes Opal who is working hard to clean it after years of neglect. The sole current Starling in residence, Arthur, is a Heathcliff type character.

With the book title including "starling", and especially with the cover art, I thought Alix E. Harrow missed a grand opportunity for more eeriness by failing to utilize the mesmerizing sensation evoked by a flock of starlings as they wheel in synchronous flight through the skies in a pattern called murmurations, shown in this two minute YouTube video from National Geogrpahic. Eerie... huh?

Per an All About Birds website for the European Starling

All the European Starlings in North America descended from 100 birds set loose in New York's Central Park in the early 1890s. The birds were intentionally released by a group who wanted America to have all the birds that Shakespeare ever mentioned. It took several tries, but eventually the population took off. Today, more than 200 million European Starlings range from Alaska to Mexico, and many people consider them pests.

Starling House was a bit slow moving to start but I am glad I stuck with it. It was spooky and eerie without resorting to being a horror novel. For this restraint I was grateful and rounded my initial rating of three and a half stars up to four stars. It is a Reese's Book Club pick, a reason strong enough for me to pick it and stick with it. "Pick and Stick" kind of sums it up for me.

★★★★☆ Really good; maybe only one weak aspect or limited audience