Who Doesn't Love a Gothic Novel?

Title: The Wildling Sisters

Author: Eve Chase

Edition: G.P. Putnam and Sons, 2017

Setting: Britain, 1950s

Genre: Gothic, Dual Timeline

Perhaps it’s because I read "Rebecca" at an impressionable age, but a juicy, well-written gothic novel set in a British country house? Sign me up!

The Wildling Sisters is a dual timeline novel set in the lovely English countryside in an old manor house called Applecote. In 1959, four sisters, Flora, Pam, Margot, and Dot Wilde, are sent there by their flighty and glamorous mother to spend the summer with their aunt and uncle. Of course, there’s a snake in the lovely Eden of Applecote; their cousin Audrey disappeared several years before, never to be seen again. The sisters spend the stifflingly hot summer dealing with the emotional wreckage of their aunt and uncle, flirting with two upper-class neighbor boys, and coping with the rivalries that come with that.

In the present, Jesse and her husband Will move into Applecote, along with Bella, Will’s daughter from his first marriage, and Jesse and Will’s baby daughter. Bella, filled with grief from her mother’s death and general teenage angst, is not happy with the move.

This is a lush, atmospheric novel with descriptive, suspenseful writing and memorable characters. Secrets, jealousies, and mysteries abound. The conclusion to both timelines is satisfying, although I felt that the story of the four sisters was compelling enough to stand alone – in these dual timeline novels, one always seems much more interesting, and for me it was the sisters.

This is the second book by Eve Chase that I’ve read and greatly enjoyed (Black Rabbit Hall was the first). If you enjoy a good atmospheric, gothic novel or books by Kate Morton, Rachel Hore, or Katherine Webb, this is probably one to seek out.