![]() ![]() The biggest saving grace is how Augusta's determination to live beyond death bodes ill for future heroines, as Augusta is a mercenary bitch who refuses to be denied anything, period - so future installments may well have a stronger gothic presence. ![]() I'd be lying if I said I liked it, because the characters are pretty flat & unpleasant (Tim, the great hulking Irishman, being a notable exception), but there are things about it that kept me reading. "So you want to see how our matriarch got started? And look! Here are ancestors of other characters who will be important in the future!" Rather, it feels like a pilot episode in a long-running tv show. There's absolutely nothing "gothic" about it, unless you count Augusta's antagonism & her building a big, cumbersome house. Point of fact, aside from one brief scene at the end, this isn't a even gothic romance. The blurb - which happens to be the most singularly inaccurate blurb in the history of 70s fiction - makes much of curses & haunted heroines & monuments to undying love, but in reality these things aren't anything to do with the story. Perhaps the biggest fail in this particular book is the lack of gothicness. ![]() It has good ideas, but the flow & development are hampered by inadequate writing - very much in the vein of Dan Ross, another prolific author whose career was defined by grandiose plots + verbal mediocrity. 'Mediocre' is the defining adjective for this novel. ![]()
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