After losing her family to World War I, Ivy Radcliffe inherits an estate on the Yorkshire moors. With nothing left for her in London, Ivy travels to Blackwood Abbey to make it her new home. However, the servants are less than welcoming, give cryptic warnings, and seem to keep secrets about the house. And why is the library locked up? Determined to learn more about her home and family history, Ivy is soon drawn into mystical rumors about ghosts, sinister manuscripts, and a murderous monk.
The first half of this book was great. I loved the old house and Ivy finding her way. There was a creepy feeling throughout with Ivy feeling like someone was watching her and moving things around in her room.
But then somewhere around halfway through the book, the story went downhill. We’re told that Ivy is stubborn and headstrong what with her decision to move to Blackwood Abbey and her insistence of opening up the library, despite the servants’ warnings. But then she does things that completely contradict that. She accepts a marriage proposal from a man that she’s only known for a couple of weeks and has only gone on a couple of dates with.
Honestly, I kept expecting there to be some sort of magical element, to find out that he had put some sort of spell on Ivy because she would think that maybe she shouldn’t marry him or would think about how strangely invested he is in the library. But then he would walk in and she would run to him and call him her hero and talk about how good he smelled. For someone who kept proclaiming how independent she was and how she didn’t need anyone’s help, she sure hung onto his arm a lot. I just thought this was weird.
I also felt like there was so much backstory that didn’t get explained that could have helped the plot. For instance, how did the abbey turn into a house? I would have loved more backstory about the monk and I think that would have made the stakes higher if we knew more about him. There is a prologue about a nun who was walled up in the abbey in the 1300s and honestly, I thought the nun would have played a bigger part considering all the pages dedicated to her. I kept waiting for her ghost to appear or something but it never happened. The book would have been better if the prologue was about the mad monk.
This book was fine but I found Ivy to be too frustrating.
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