Book Club Review: “Starling House”

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We are part of a group of librarian friends who have had an ongoing book club running for the last several years. Each “season” (we’re nerds) we pick a theme and each of us chooses a book within that theme for us all to read. Re-visiting some of our past themes, we’re once again pulling genres from a hatch and matching them together in one book. For this blog, we will post a joint review of each book we read for book club. We’ll also post the next book coming up in book club. So feel free to read along with us or use our book selections and questions in your own book club!

Book: “Starling House” by Alix E. Harrow

Publishing Info: Tor Books, October 2023

Where Did I Get This Book: We own it!

Where You Can Get This Book: WorldCat.org | Amazon | Indiebound

Mix-and-Match Genres: Dark Fantasy and Contemporary Romance

Book Description: 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 choice 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.

Kate’s Thoughts

Alix E. Harrow has been hit or miss for me in the past. I absolutely adored “The Once and Future Witches”, but didn’t really connect with “The Ten Thousand Doors of January”. But “Starling House” caught my eye back at ALA in 2023, and then I just neglected to actually read it until Serena picked it for book club! So that worked out!

Overall this was a pretty enjoyable read for me! True, it was a bit more on the fantasy side when it comes to what I expect from a Gothic tale with a strange/notorious house, but I greatly enjoyed the way that Harrow created a history of a place, gave it some mystery and tragedy, and built it up into more of a found family and Gothic fantasy with a lot of heart and emotional beats. I really loved Opal and Arthur’s relationship an seeing it grow and change, and I found it very easy to root for them as they come closer together as they try to unlock the secrets of Starling House and how that connects to them both. Opal was an enjoyable narrator and I really liked Arthur as well, so yeah, of course the romance was going to work for me. I just love an intrepid interloper and the brooding/strange caretaker of a creepy old house!

But what I also really liked was the way that Harrow ties in the sadness and darkness of the community in small town Kentucky that has been ravaged by economic hardship and a collapsing job economy. The discussion of small rural towns, especially in the Rust Belt, being left behind has been a topic of conversation for more than a decade now, and as we see the fallout from these sad truths and the way that communities dig in and cling to a past only to be forgotten or tossed aside is a HUGE theme in this book, and I found that to be very emotional and deeply engaging. It added a whole other layer to the story that brought in some more bittersweet undercurrents. Throw in some ruminations on the destruction these practices also bring to the Earth and the way that rot can keep cycling through both literally and metaphorically and you have some heavy topics that Harrow treats with respect and empathy.

I am so glad that I finally read “Starling House”! Add another winning read to my Harrow experience!

Serena’s Thoughts

Shocking no one, I still enjoyed this a second time around! I always feel a bit guilty picking a book I’ve read before for my own bookclub choice, but in this case, my prompt of genres to mix was a bit challenging. Without going straight to urban fantasy (the typical crossover you might see, though “dark” perhaps is questionable as far as the fantasy elements go), it was tough to find a book that fit the prompt. But here we have a contemporary story (check), a gothic house with a creepy past (check), and a romance (check!).

On that last point, I had forgotten just how strongly the book focused on the romance. I remembered there being a nice love story, but I had forgotten how central it really was, making up a majority of the “action” in the middle portion of the book. Yes, these two could have communicated more and solved most of their problems. But unlike the books where I often have this complaint, both Opal and Arthur had character-based reasons for not opening up quickly, which, to me, made their slow-burn romance all the more effective when it finally game together at the end.

Like before, the house itself was probably one of my favorite characters. I’ll be curious to see how the “dark” thing lands for the other members of bookclub; this is a gothic fantasy story with a haunted house that reads more like a neglected puppy dog just wanting to be loved! I though there were some really nice reflections on what makes up family and home to be found here, especially Opal’s growing understanding of the love/hate relationship she has to the town itself.

As I’ve done an entire review of this book before (check out that if you want more of my detailed thoughts), I’ll wrap my portion up here. I think this book crosses over a ton of genres, even beyond the ones asked for by the prompt, making it a great book for a large variety of readers. Once again, I highly recommend it, especially to gothic fantasy fans!

Kate’s Rating 9 : A truly unique take on a Gothic strange house with a lot of heart and emotion!

Serena’s Rating 10: Still love this one just as much as before! I will say that if I was rating it purely as an audiobook this time, I’d drop it down to a 9, since I didn’t love this narrator’s reading of Opal’s personality/voice.

Book Club Questions

1. The story is split between Opal and Arthur. What interested you most about each character’s arc in this book?
2. Wanting vs. needing is a major theme of this book. How does this drive Opal and Arthur throughout the book? Did any particular insights on this theme stand out to you?
3. Another theme explored in the book is that of story itself, both in how we remember history and how we remember own own stories. How did these themes come into play with some of the twists at the end of the book?
4. There are a lot of interesting side characters throughout this book, including Starling House itself. Did any of these stand out to you and why? Would you like to know more about any of them?
5. The mixed genres for this pick were dark fantasy and contemporary romance. Were these genres well-represented? Was one stronger than the other? Were there aspects of either that you enjoyed or didn’t like?

Reader’s Advisory

“Starling House” is included on these Goodreads lists: Gothic Fantasy and Sentient Houses.

Next Book Club Pick: “Red Shirts” by Jon Scalzi