Tag Archives: Gothic

Review: Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

Book Review and Content, Historical, Young Adult/Teen 12-18, , , , , , ,
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë
Viking Classics
Published November 22, 2022 (Orig. 1847)

Amazon | Bookshop | Goodreads

About Wuthering Heights

“Whatever our souls are made out of, his and mine are the same.” -Catherine

Emily Brontë’s 1847 gothic novel is set on the windy moors of Yorkshire and depicts the tragic and ill-fated love between Catherine Earnshaw and her father’s adopted son, Heathcliff.

Using vivid imagery to portray their volatile, passionate relationship, Brontë has crafted a timeless masterpiece that honestly depicts the pain and anguish felt from love, hatred, and revenge.

For over 150 years, millions of readers have found Wuthering Heights to be a must-read of the greatest classical novels in English Literature. It has been translated into stage, film and television for decades. Completed as her only novel before her death, Emily Brontë is generally considered one of the most talented and gifted storytellers to have ever lived.

About My Review

This is one of the books I am sure I read in school, and my only surviving memories of it are how much I didn’t like it. Because I want to read the Remixed Classics version, WHAT SOULS ARE MADE OF by Tasha Suri, I wanted to reread the original to give me a grid for the remix and how things changed. I’m not a literature expert, so this definitely won’t be a technical review.

Why I Reread Wuthering Heights

My memories of this book before this reread were pretty thin. I remembered Heathcliffe as an unpredictably violent person and Cathy as a lovesick girl. I did not remember the abusive behavior by so many of the characters in this book, including Catherine. So much yikes.

My Review

Honestly, by the time I hit chapter ten, I felt like Heathcliffe, who’d been found as a very young child and dragged home by perhaps a well-meaning man, was the person I sympathized with most. He didn’t ask for all the bananas behavior of the Earnshaws, and he certainly didn’t ask to place himself in the center of a group of people who treated him so abominably. And then.

He ruined it. I love that he went away and made his fortune and educated himself. Good for him for breaking away. Then, he comes back and vows to destroy the people who harmed or betrayed him in his youth. That was such a waste of his time.

Catherine continues to be terrible to him and pretty much anyone around her. Heathcliffe continues his plot to ruin the lives of the Lintons and Earnshaws. For a while, he’s completely successful. He abuses his wife, his son, and his daughter-in-law. Eventually, near the end of his life, Catherine’s daughter and nephew seem to find their way past the animosity they’ve been raised to feel for one another, and the story ends with a possibility of hope.

Racism in Wuthering Heights?

Again, I’m not a literary expert by any stretch of the imagination. I do want to point out that multiple times, especially at the beginning of the book and the end, characters refer to Heathcliffe using the G-slur used against the Romani people. At multiple other times, characters use words that suggest a darker complexion to label him as a bad person. The narrator, Ellen, also refers to Heathcliffe’s son (who is white-passing) as a “monkey.” It’s unclear whether she meant to insult his behavior alone or was referencing his heritage.

Content Notes

Recommended for Ages 16 up.

Representation
Characters describe Heathcliffe as having darker skin and several times refer to him with the G-slur used against Romani people.

Profanity/Crude Language Content
The G-slur is used multiple times. Mild profanity used somewhat infrequently. Cathy uses cruel language to label her cousin, Hareton, who can’t read, as Heathcliffe barred him from learning.

Romance/Sexual Content
Kissing between boy and girl.

Spiritual Content
A man has a strange dream after reading a sermon about forgiveness. One character, a cold, cruel older man behaves piously and speaks authoritatively about scripture and God.

The narrator warns Heathcliffe that he should get a Bible and read it to see where he should repent and change his ways. She asks him if she can summon a minister of any denomination to speak with him. He refuses.

Violent Content
A man has a creepy nightmare about a child grabbing his hand and demanding that he let her in through his window. A boy physically abuses his adopted brother. A girl hits a servant, shakes a child, and hits her lover. A drunk man threatens to harm multiple people. He shoves a knife into a young woman’s mouth before trying to throw a child off a balcony.

Multiple on-scene deaths from illness.

A man hits more than one woman and locks doors to prevent her being able to leave. He threatens a young woman, forcing her to marry someone. A man shows a woman a gun and tells her to lock herself in her room at night or else he may try to murder the room’s occupants.

Drug Content
One minor character repeatedly gets drunk and violent.

Note: This post contains affiliate links, which do not cost you anything to use, but which help support this blog.

Review: All the Dead Lie Down by Kyrie McCauley

Blogger's Favorites, Book Review and Content, Contemporary, Mystery/Suspense/Thriller, Young Adult/Teen 12-18, , , , , , , , , ,

All the Dead Lie Down
Kyrie McCauley
Katherine Tegen Books
Published May 16, 2023

Amazon | Bookshop | Goodreads

All the Dead Lie Down

The Haunting of Bly Manor meets House of Salt and Sorrows in award-winning author Kyrie McCauley’s contemporary YA gothic romance about a dark family lineage, the ghosts of grief, and the lines we’ll cross for love.

The Sleeping House was very much awake . . .

Days after a tragedy leaves Marin Blythe alone in the world, she receives a surprising invitation from Alice Lovelace—an acclaimed horror writer and childhood friend of Marin’s mother. Alice offers her a nanny position at Lovelace House, the family’s coastal Maine estate.

Marin accepts and soon finds herself minding Alice’s peculiar girls. Thea buries her dolls one by one, hosting a series of funerals, while Wren does everything in her power to drive Marin away. Then Alice’s eldest daughter returns home unexpectedly. Evie Hallowell is every bit as strange as her younger sisters, and yet Marin is quickly drawn in by Evie’s compelling behavior and ethereal grace.

But as Marin settles in, she can’t escape the anxiety that follows her like a shadow. Dead birds appear in Marin’s room. The children’s pranks escalate. Something dangerous lurks in the woods, leaving mutilated animals in its wake. All is not well at Lovelace House, and Marin must unravel its secrets before they consume her.

My Review

I completely fell in love with Kyrie McCauley’s writing in her book WE CAN BE HEROES, so when I saw she had a new book coming out, I didn’t even read what it was before requesting a copy for review. Ha.

The cover copy gave me some THE TURN OF THE SCREW vibes– a girl comes to an old estate to work as a nanny for two children who have some creepy habits. This isn’t a retelling of that play, though. The setup is similar, but the plot goes a whole lot of other places.

I liked the dark, endlessly creepy vibes. It definitely has that edge-of-your-seat, something-really-bad-is-about-to-happen kind of feeling all the way through the book.

The characters really hooked me into the story, too. It’s a very predominantly female cast. I think the only male named characters are the Lovelace girls’ father and a neighbor man who kind of looks out for danger in the woods. The younger sisters are mischievous and odd. It’s easy to tell they’re lonely and grieving, and that they’re keeping some kind of secret. I liked the push and pull feeling of the relationship between them and Marin, who feels drawn to them because of their sorrow and loneliness but wary because they can be capricious and cold.

As Marin tries to untangle the mystery around the Lovelace estate and the complicated history between her mother and Alice Lovelace, she also meets a girl her age, and a tenuous romance develops between them. I loved the sweetness of that love against the darkness of the rest of the story.

Conclusion

I feel like ALL THE DEAD LIE DOWN left me with a lot of questions. Not in the sense of the story seeming unfinished– I liked the end a lot. It just left me with a lot of questions about how to weigh out someone’s motives versus the outcomes of their choices.

Overall, I definitely recommend this book for readers looking for a romance with a really dark edge to it. I could see fans of WE WERE LIARS by E. Lockhart or IT LOOKS LIKE US by Alison Ames really liking this one.

Content Notes

Recommended for Ages 14 up.

Representation
Marin and a girl have a romantic relationship. Major characters are white. Marin has anxiety and panic attacks.

Profanity/Crude Language Content
Strong profanity used somewhat infrequently.

Romance/Sexual Content
Kissing between two girls. References to more than that. They sleep in the same bed overnight.

Spiritual Content
Marin sees animals who are critically, even fatally, injured limping around. At first she isn’t sure whether they’re dying or if something else is happening to them. Several birds in this state end up in her room.

See spoiler section at the end for more.

Violent Content
Situations of peril. See spoiler section.

Drug Content
Marin and Evie drink alcohol together one night.

Note: This post contains affiliate links, which do not cost you anything to use, but which help support this blog. I received a free copy of ALL THE DEAD LIE DOWN in exchange for my honest review.

Spoilers Below

Spiritual Content
Marin encounters creatures that are undead… they were dead but are somehow alive, even in their decayed state. Some descriptions of partially rotted or decrepit animals and people. She learns that someone has the ability to bring back the dead.

Violent Content
Sometimes the creatures who are reanimated come back “dark”, meaning they are bent on causing harm to people. Marin and her allies fight more than one undead creature intent on harming them.