Charlotte Kersten

The villagers of Rixton—including Adelaide’s father, the vicar—believe her to be the monster responsible for all the town’s tragedies, spurred on by the strange visions and blackouts caused by her chronic illness. Kept locked away except for funerals, even Addie herself begins to wonder if she is the one with blood on her hands.

But when she discovers a peculiar bell nestled in a riverbed, Addie realizes the truth behind her strange visions—they are actually the ghosts of the village’s dead searching for rest. With the bell’s strange power allowing her to see the lost souls and open a doorway to the Rowan Wood where they are trapped, she strikes a deal with the ghost of Bram Avery and the young lord Ransom Black to venture into the hellish purgatory.

As the three make their way deeper into the Wood, each motivated by their own desperate desires, trust turns to betrayal and flawless facades begin to flicker. It may be that the ones Addie has so longed to reunite are those who have been lying to her her entire life.

Review

(ARC received from NetGalley.)

Here’s another one to add to my ever-growing pile of Evil Woods Fantasy AND what I’ve come to not-so-fondly call Go Girl Give Us Nothing Fantasy. Go Girl Give Us Nothing Fantasy is always heavy on the vibes and light on…well, everything else. You may be tempted to read these books because of their intriguing premises and you may see glimmers of interesting ideas here and there within their pages, but GGGUNF books are fundamentally flimsy and deeply underbaked. They need a few more months of work and/or a few more drafts, at the very least.

Bitterbloom checks basically every other box I’ve seen its sisters check before. The author’s prose is positively STRAINING to be lyrical/poetic/atmospheric but it lacks any kind of finesse so it just ends up coming across as overwrought, awkward and kind of embarrassingly melodramatic instead. Each page is laden with questionable metaphors and similes and increasingly inventive ways of describing Addie’s visceral physical reactions to the book’s events. What might have started as a way to explore her emotional/psychological connection to her body’s reactions as a character with chronic illness ends up becoming distractingly repetitive and limiting her psychological depth as a character instead.

Addie is only ever vague as a character, as are her two love interests, Ransom and Bram. She spends so little time with them and we know so little about them that all of the emotional beats and plot developments related to them land poorly as a result; the fact that she ends up horribly betrayed by one and happily declaring her love for the other by the end feels funny more than anything else. We end up learning very little about Addie’s world and the religion underlying her quest into purgatory, which would bother me less if her quest was richer in thematic exploration or personal growth. Addie starts out the book righteously denouncing her horrible father for his abuse and seething about how medicine and doctrine are wielded to scapegoat vulnerable women. She ends the book with all of these same opinions but also able to attack people with flowers because she has 1) grown into her magical heritage and 2) confirmed that she was not, in fact, serially murdering women in her village in a fugue state. So that’s good!!! Idk it really just feels like nothing has been given enough time to be developed adequately, and I’m so puzzled that everyone involved in this book’s creation decided that THIS was the point to stop at.

I mostly just see the unfulfilled potential here, but if you are particularly drawn to Evil Woods Fantasy and are happier than me to chill with creepy rotting botanical vibes, lots of metaphors, and the merest whiff of girlpower overcoming religious trauma, this might be a better experience for you.