I liked this book a lot. It was gloomy and beautiful at the same time, and the end definitely left me hungry for more. However, the protagonist remained distant throughout the story. I related more to Jonah Riven than her. I don't know if she was made sort of a spear carrier of her own life on purpose or if it's just me not being able to get a grip on her.

The language was incomprehensible to a non-native English listener in places but at least I learned a bunch of new words, and you can grasp the idea of the sentence even if you don't know one word in it anyway.

All in all, a book worth listening/reading. ( )

Monstrous Heart is the story of Arden Beacon, who is a lighthouse keeper. This is pretty unique; I haven't read any books with a woman in charge of a lighthouse before. Even more uniquely, this lighthouse is powered by something in Arden's blood, because she is what, in the book's world, is known as a sanguine. Dangers lurk at the lighthouse, and, after the book starts with a dramatic bar fight, Arden is thrown into a world of sea monsters and a mysterious man who supposedly murdered his wife. And all this is set to a backdrop of the Eugenics society, whose operatives are known ominously as the Lions, with a web of dark politics and restricted relationships.

I'm going to start with the things in this book that I liked. I was immediately interested in the fantasy world that Arden lives in. The world building is good, making the world feel real and three dimensional. There is definitely a whole world beyond the pages of the book, and we are simply seeing one story from it. There is also a wonderful sense of place. The town and the lighthouse feel cold, damp, grimy and neglected. It is very atmospheric, and definitely lives up to the claim of gothic. The characters are also well described, each one interesting in their own way. I liked Arden straight away. She is a strong female character who knows her own mind, despite all the men who think otherwise. I particularly liked the following conversation between Arden and her father:
'You will be a puppet.'
'I am already a puppet... Look at my strings!'
'You are destroying your life.'
'No, father. I'm controlling the tide.'
Coastmaster Justinian, on the other hand, I immediately hated! This is a good thing; every book needs a good villain. He's slimy and squicks me out. In the notes I took while I was reading, I just wrote 'horrid man'.

The book is also occasionally darkly humerous, which helps to break the doom and gloom. One line that made me laugh was 'she might have considered throwing herself off the balcony, only that this balcony was at ground level and the act probably lost much of its meaning when one landed safely on the other side.'

But I am only rating this book 3 stars, and that's because there is also a lot I don't like about the book. Mostly, the actual writing. The use of the passive voice feels stilted. I guess that the writer has used the passive voice to try to make the book sound a bit old timey, and give it that fantasy feeling, but really it just makes the story not flow very well. I also felt that the descriptive writing was evocative at first, until it wasn't. Sometimes the choice of words added to the descriptions in a good way, but many times it just felt like the writer had vomited a thesaurus. For the first two thirds of the book it felt like not much was happening, and I wonder if it felt even slower than it was because of the amount of unnecessary descriptive words.

Another quibble, this one more minor, is simply why must fantasy worlds always be sexist? The scene where Arden was trying to persuade herself to like Justinian really annoyed me. She had been shown to be a character who knew her own mind, and yet she actually entertains the idea that she could be happy with that awful man.

I did like the story more once Chalice had been introduced. She's an interesting character, quite fiesty, with her own mysterious backstory. To be honest, I wanted the story to be about her and Arden. She just interested me more than Riven and Justinian.

I Would have liked this book more if it had been easier to read. I felt like I was having to work really hard to reach the story through the superfluous words. When the story picked up and things finally started happening I found it more enjoyable. ( )

Monstrous Heart by Claire McKenna is intriguing Gothic fantasy, filled with magic, danger both on land and out at sea. It’s a debut novel classic Gothic literature such as Wuthering Heights, Northanger Abbey and The Bloody Chamber.

I received a copy of this book through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts and opinions expressed here are my own.

Rating: 3.5/5 ( )