Charlotte Kersten

Inspired by the gothic classic Wuthering Heights, this stunning fantasy from the author of the Books of Pellinor is a fiercely romantic tale of betrayal and vengeance.

In a savage land sustained by wizardry and ruled by vendetta, Lina is the enchanting but willful daughter of a village lord. She and her childhood companion, Damek, have grown up privileged and spoiled, and they’re devoted to each other to the point of obsession. But Lina’s violet eyes betray her for a witch, and witches are not tolerated in a brutally patriarchal society. Her rank protects her from persecution, but it cannot protect her from tragedy and heartbreak. An innocent visitor stands witness to the devastation that ensues as destructive longing unleashes Lina’s wrath, and with it her forbidden power. Whether drawn by the romantic, the magical, or the gothic, readers will be irresistibly compelled by the passion of this tragic tale.

Review

I LOVED Croggon’s Books of Pellinor when I read them a couple of years ago, and when I heard she’d written a Wuthering Heights retelling with dark magic, I was really excited. Croggon’s prose is lovely and her ability to evoke bleak, desolate, beautiful landscapes seemed like it would make her Wuthering Heights retelling fantastic. Black Spring was, sadly, just…okay? The writing is definitely great, but the magic elements that are intended to deepen the exploration of cyclical violence don’t really do that in a very impactful way despite being fairly interesting.

My biggest criticism is that, in my opinion, Croggon’s deviations from Bronte’s story are kind of questionable, because they mainly involve adding some sexual violence and significantly changing the second generation of characters. Instead of Cathy’s brother Hindley taking over the estate after their father dies, Cathy/Lina in this book has no brother and a random gross noble guy gets awarded her father’s estate. He saves the same basic purpose of driving Heathcliff/Damek away and eventually getting destroyed in Heathcliff/Damek’s Villian Era, but he also randomly rapes Cathy/Lina on one occasion while she is a young woman prior to her getting married and moving out. Because there’s no Hindley, there is also no Hareton, so Croggon’s way of carrying on the story with the second generation is to have Cathy/Lina’s daughter get seduced and then horribly abused by Heathcliff/Damek in the place of Linton’s sister, Isabella. Okay this is really confusing as I write it out but hopefully it makes sense to anyone who has read Wuthering Heights.

I don’t really understand why Croggon did any of this because it’s all handled so…haphazardly? I get the sense that Cathy’s rape is intended to add on to Croggon’s general attempt to make the story more feminist, but it is barely mentioned again after it happens. Similarly, while the concept of Heathcliff/Damek conniving to steal away and then torture Cathy/Lina’s daughter in her place is definitely an idea with a lot of implications that could be explored in a powerful way, everything after Cathy/Lina’s death gets crammed in at very end of the book (there were 15 minutes left on my Kindle at the point where they got married, I checked!). There are a few paragraphs that are like “Wow it’s really fucked up that Damek did this,” and then suddenly he’s killing himself and we’re wrapping it all up.

What’s exasperating to me is that if you’re going to go down this particular path in an attempt to say something stronger about Heathcliff/Damek’s patriarchal entitlement and violence, I really believe that the inclusion of a Hareton character would make the point a lot more effectively. The Catherine/Hareton story in the original book is all about trying to break the families’ cycles of generational abuse/trauma/hatred, and that could be done just as powerfully in a version of the story where young Catherine is married to Heathcliff and Hareton is also being abused by him in the same home. You could easily write them coming together to get out from under his control/break the cycle of damaging patriarchal masculinity and then end the story in the same general way!!! I think that would be so good that I’m now really mad that I didn’t get to read that!!!

If you love Wuthering Heights and want to see some vague feminist themes and weird magic sprinkled on top of Cathy and Heathcliff’s story, I think this is well-written enough to read for that purpose. It just could have done way more, and that’s a shame.