Confident in her training, she thinks she can handle whatever it is that walks the halls at night and scoffs at the warning. “The Waking begins at ten o’clock sharp, and everyone must be locked in their rooms by then,” Andi is told ominously by Rochester’s housekeeper.

(This castle is an extreme oddity, set in a land distant from England, but Blackwood does an excellent job of explaining how it, and its owner, ended up there.) He has removed himself and his household of loyal servants from all society because the Evil Eye Manifestations in his home are so dangerous and violent. The infamous cursed Englishman lives isolated in a dark, cold castle in the middle of a desert.

Cut off from her mentor due to an ugly earlier confrontation and without an important license to obtain important work on her own, she is starving and desperate when she accepts a job offer from Magnus Rochester. It works the whole dark story works.Īndromeda is an exorcist who is hired to banish the Evil Eye from cursed houses. This is a novel that brings mystery, romance, bloody horror, and magic together with a fast-paced plot and dynamic setting and succeeds on every level. My first job with this review, then, is to reassure everyone that not only does Within These Wicked Walls live up to the comparison, it is also an enthralling gothic tale that will appeal to readers with no knowledge of Thornfield Hall, destitute governesses, or, thank goodness, the cliched “mad woman in the attic.” Personally, I’m not a fan of Jane Eyre, but I have many positive things to say about Blackwood’s book. The publicity materials for Lauren Blackwood’s Within These Wicked Walls describe the book as an “Ethiopian-inspired debut retelling of Jane Eyre.” If you aren’t a fan of Charlotte Bronte’s classic this might put you off the book, whereas, if you are a fan, you might be instantly concerned that the marketing machine is overreaching.

Within These Wicked Walls, Lauren Blackwood ( Wednesday Books 978-0-1, $18.99, hc 336pp) November 2021.

Within wicked walls