☕️☕️☕️☕️ FANTASTIC!! (rating based as a YA novel)

Izzy is teen, trying to find her own identity kicking back at Mum, Lady Lindy GiffinClark. A fresh start sees Lindy move the household to Stagcote Manor in the middle of nowhere. A move that turns out to be more sinister than refreshing.

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What I liked best about this book?

I love the character of Izzy I because I have met 'her' many times when I was a support worker with young adults. When you love a guy who is exciting, in a band and wrapped up in music, it is hard to cope emotionally when he is no longer around. Cosmo understood Izzy, and made her feel like she was a special someone. The agony of being misunderstood is very well portrayed in her character. I love the way Izzy describes her struggling relationship with her mother and how she feels:

Me looking the way I do is all about me, not her…

….because it made no space for who I wanted to be.

There are so many beautiful passages in this book that has real resonance with the difficulties of being a young adult, I could pick out many but reading them would be more enjoyable, I promise you. Pateman has great way of capturing the essence of each of the characters which is pleasurable to read.

Now, her mother is taking her away from London into the countryside, away from the buzz of the city into the countryside and enrolling her in a private school to ‘start afresh’ where she knows she will not fit in.

This a tense suspense and horror story, the manor they move to is exactly how you want a spooky manor to be, with a village and villagers to match. Lindy, her mother thinks life is going to be better for two of them but she knows nothing yet! I was on the edge of my chair eager to read what happens next.

The village is so full of weird folklore customs and rituals that it scares the living daylights out of housekeeper Olga when she is told of the things she must not do to incur the ‘curse’; and then the bees need to be told every piece of gossip going to keep them happy and old Cedric sees to that.

Twin sisters, Brenda and Glenda the help for Olga the housekeeper are wonderfully odd and dark, and Cedric (who incidentally sounded in my head like Joe Grundy from BBC Radio 4 The Archers!) was crazily eccentric but they all had an undercurrent of something hauntingly unwholesome about them.

Stagcote Manor is a hodgepodge of a building with bits added in different centuries adding to the dark spaces and undercurrents, and when Izzy hears noises in her bedroom at night she embarks on a journey she feels compelled to follow unearthing some dark secrets that have serious consequence.

The description at the beginning of Stagcote Manor is the start of what’s to come.

It’s so remote and empty that night snaps over it like a lid.

I love a good spooky tale and the hairs on the back of my neck stood up as I read this novel.

The bits that did not quite work for me:

The very start with ‘The gun doesn’t make me feel any safer…’ felt alien to the rest of the novel, I couldn’t connect the gun scene to anything specific in the book so it seemed out of place.

I also felt the the title was a little misleading as I was waiting for the bees to swarm or be malevolent and become a major part of the story but it didn’t happen.

Although this is marketed as an Adult book it more suited as a Young Adult Psychological/folklore and suspense genre, and is clearly a great novel for that market.

All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed it!

Would I recommend this book! YES Definitely

Many thanks to the publisher via NetGalley for an early copy in return for my honest review.




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