Author: Amy Lukavics
Synopsis:
Lucy Acosta's mother
died when she was three. Growing up in a Victorian mansion in the middle
of the woods with her cold, distant father, she and her best friend and
cousin, Margaret, know the ancient hallways inside out. Or so they
think . . .
When her beloved Aunt Penelope disappears while walking in the surrounding woods, Lucy finds herself devastated and alone. Margaret, meanwhile, has been spending a LOT of time in the attic. She claims she can hear her mother's voice whispering from the walls.
Shut out by her father, Lucy watches helplessly as her cousin's sanity slowly and completely unravels. And then she begins hearing voices herself...
When her beloved Aunt Penelope disappears while walking in the surrounding woods, Lucy finds herself devastated and alone. Margaret, meanwhile, has been spending a LOT of time in the attic. She claims she can hear her mother's voice whispering from the walls.
Shut out by her father, Lucy watches helplessly as her cousin's sanity slowly and completely unravels. And then she begins hearing voices herself...
My Thoughts:
Welcome to the house in the middle of nowhere, where your dead loved ones speak to you through the walls. There's nothing creepy about it at all; they simply love you so much, they want you to join them. They suggest you could live happily ever after together behind the walls. You don't have much choice in the matter anyway they say, why wait? Not creepy at all...
The basic premise of this book is extremely disturbing. The whole haunted house trope gives me the chills in itself, but when the house and whatever power is hidden in it's structure gets into your head... well, that's even more unnerving.
The Women in the Walls is a very atmospheric horror book. The claustrophobic feeling that the house as a setting generated in me helped me put myself in Lucy's place, helped me imagine what she was really going through.
Most events in the book take place inside the house, the characters rarely venture outside and thanks to this seclusion a certain kind of sinister mood is created way before the nasty things start to happen.
Most events in the book take place inside the house, the characters rarely venture outside and thanks to this seclusion a certain kind of sinister mood is created way before the nasty things start to happen.
While I was more than happy with the terrifying setting, unfortuantely I cannot say I was fully satisfied with this book. The characters were a bit shallow, they could have been designed with more care. They lacked details, they were mostly endowed with one or two characteristics... all in all they were very two dimensional. On the top of that Lucy's cousin Margret was very unlikable – at least to me –, which was a problem because all Lucy's actions in the second half of the novel were driven by the love for her cousin. The few glimpses I'd got of Margaret before she started to go bonkers didn't convince me she was the best of best friends. It was really hard to see what Lucy loved about her, at least that's how I felt.
It was also strange that the girls had lived on the estate for 17 years and they didn't discover their surroundings (at some point they found something in the forest they didn't know was there but obviously had been there since they were born...)
I loved the pacing on the last 20-30 pages, the plot became very dense there, one horrifying thing happened after the other and I couldn't wait to know how the dark adventure would end. The ending was somewhat surprising but I absolutely liked it!
As you can see I had mixed feelings about The Women in the Walls, but it was still fun. I don't regret that I picked it up.
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