Starling House is a gothic fantasy romance set in a small town of Eden, Kentucky. The story follows Opal. Opal lives in a motel room with her younger brother, Jasper. Opal spends her days working to save money to send Jasper away from run down Eden, to give him a better future. Starling House is the town's mysterious residence surrounded by lore and legend. Opal is drawn to Starling House and one day, when she is walking passed it's gates, she runs into Starling House's enigmatic owner, Arthur Starling. Arthur ends up giving Opal a job as a housekeeper for Starling House. This new position gives a level of access to Starling House and its inner workings that no one else in town has ever had. Opal learns about Starling House's past and unexpectedly starts having a hand in it's future.

I am not that biggest fan of cotemporary fantasy, but Starling House is the perfect mixture of magic, gothic, and romance. Harrow's writing is exquisite. She has a way of writing characters and overall story arcs that you can easily get lost in. Starling House is written as a character of its own, like most gothic stories. I loved spending time in Starling House and discovering its secrets alongside Opal and Arthur. I also loved Starling House's focus on the ideas of family, home, and ecological degradation. The romance was slow burn and so so sweet. I also loved most of the side characters in Opal's life, especially Hellcat.

Fantasy, gothic fiction, or romance readers will all find something to love in Starling House. If a dark, small town story filled with history and magic intrigues you, pick Starling House up!

This was my first Harrow book so my expectations were high and my goodness were they exceeded! I’m a sucker for a slightly feral main character and a semi-conscious gothic house, so needless to say this one was an immediate hit!

Harrow is a master of atmosphere, and this is no exception. She made these characters feel so flawed and real, and I felt like this town felt very grounded. The romance wasn't too much and it didn't feel forced. I thoroughly enjoyed this.

I love the work of Alix E. Harrow and she cannot write fast enough! Starling House is no exception. I caught influences of Sleeping Beauty and Beauty and the Beast, but the story was fresh and interesting. Harrow created a well-paced, atmospheric story that is engaging and fantastical with a tinge of horror.

I really enjoyed the gothic elements in this book! I ultimately decided to go with a 3.5 stars for this one. I found the setting and plot to be very interesting, but the character development to be a bit lacking. Would definitely still recommend!

I couldn’t imagine a more perfect October/Halloween read than Starling House. With a sumptuous gothic atmosphere and setting, deeply flawed characters who you desperately want to succeed, a living haunted house that plays a pivotal role in the narrative, and Harrow’s ever-gorgeous prose, Starling House captivated me from the first page.

Opal, a drifter and a grifter, has been scraping by to make ends meet since she lost her mother as a girl, and right now, she’s cobbling together fragments in the sleepy town of Eden. When a job offer almost too good to be true comes from the brooding, taciturn heir to the infamous Starling House, Arthur, Opal disregards her self-preservation and takes it. The two get drawn together in the sinister coils of an unfolding mystery and have a choice: face their fears together or let nightmares destroy their small town.

Harrow is one of my favourite authors and Starling House did nothing to dissuade me of this opinion. She has a gift for weaving a story-within-a-story, which has featured predominantly in many of her novels, and yet executes each take on this concept in fresh, compelling ways. This novel drew me in as surely as Starling House draws main characters Opal and Arthur together. I felt consumed by it.

In addition to the immersive gothic atmosphere, the characters and relationships kept me invested in this story. Themes of love, family, trauma, and belonging play out in the significant relationships, most notably between Arthur and Opal and Opal and her younger brother. Starling House asks the reader via the characters to meditate on the notion of home: what it is, WHO it is, how easily one can lose it, and how to find it again.

In short: if you’re looking for an evocative gothic fantasy with strong throughlines of romance and a poignant emotional climax, Starling House might be for you. I will continue to avidly read everything Alix E. Harrow writes because I have yet to be disappointed.

Thank you to NetGalley and Tor Books for an advance review copy. All opinions are my own.

This was such a wonderful read! It's been a minute since I sunk into a gothic novel, and this was just a lot of fun to spend time with. It was very gothic, a little gritty, and a little romantic.

Starling House is a somewhat sentient old manor that sits on the edge of a bad luck town. It's only occupant, Arthur, is a bit of a recluse. Rumors about the house have swirled around for years, and the truth might still be in them somewhere. Opal has always felt drawn to the house. And that's where our story begins.

The setting of Eden, Kentucky is so well done, you can almost taste the pollution from the local power plant, and feel the miasma of bad luck that has settled over the town. Opal is fierce, tough, has never felt quite at home, and is still learning how to trust the people who have cared for her. Arthur has been carrying too much for too long, he's resolute, and very broken. I loved them both as soon as they appeared on the page.

This book is imaginative, a little bit magical, a little mysterious, and a lot of the right kind of broken, human people trying to take care of each other and protect their home from the baddies. Harrow does a wonderful job with it, and I was so satisfied when I finished it that I almost wanted to start it right over. I can definitely see this being a reread for me in future years!

This book is perfect for readers who love a good gothic novel, rooting for an anti-hero, and learning to befriend their own nightmares.

I recieved an ARC from Netgalley, this is an unbiased review.

I'm going to have to just start autobuying Harrow's books, because I have yet to be disappointed. Starling House was just gloriously Gothic, dreamlike (and nightmare-like!), and romantic. I know that "the house is alive" was technically not supposed to be a good thing, but I would just like to say that I loved Starling House as a character in its own right and would live there in a heartbeat.

Alix E. Harrow’s Multi-Genre Starling House Builds a Home Inside a Story

It’s an exciting point when a reader can begin to identify common themes and motifs in an author’s body of work. Though I first came to Alix E. Harrow’s writing through the fairy tale remix novella A Spindle Splintered, looking backwards and forwards across her books, patterns emerge. A woman locked away in an old house, escaping through literary portals in The Ten Thousand Doors of January. A coven offering their powers to the suffragette movement in The Once and Future Witches. Sleeping Beauties and Wicked Queens fragmented across retellings. Her latest novel Starling House collects variations on each of these devices, yet despite any familiar glimmers it’s still something wholly new, and undoubtedly her best work yet.

A modern Gothic thriller set in a downtrodden Kentucky coal town, Starling House is satisfyingly creepy while being animated by more than one love story—the one you might expect, between two compelling misfits, but also between a sentient house and its inhabitants. It’s a masterful meditation on the stories that make and unmake us.

Opal dreams of Starling House, the imposing old house calling to her with its warm amber light every night. But unconsciousness is the only time she can give over to such vulnerable yearning; in her waking life, she must look after her asthmatic teenage brother Jasper, working dead-end cashier shifts and engaging in petty thievery in order to get him out of Eden, Kentucky, and into a better life. Only one of them can afford to make it out, and Opal has long since given up on herself.

But the evening that she allows herself to walk past Starling House’s gates, she meets the house’s sole inhabitant, Arthur Starling, who is determined to be the last Warden of Starling House. Until Opal talks her way into a job as housekeeper—for the egregious amount of money Arthur is willing to pay her, of course, but maybe also because she’ll finally get to set foot indoors and scratch her imagination’s itch. What should be a simple job changes the course of Opal’s life, both unspooling a future she never dared imagine for herself as well as unwinding the narrative she’s always believed about her unfortunate life.

The bones of Opal’s story, while initially mundane, have the heft of dark fairy tale: A town, overtaken by a wealthy and powerful clan who have shaped it to their will and collected the fortune in their faraway castles, leaving the actual residents defenseless against the curse they put on the land. A collection of dark fairy tales descending into the Underland, its author long disappeared, either a guide or a warning. Two orphans whose entire world is a motel room, with its transitory guests and permanent water stains, trading a single laptop back and forth into which they try to research their pasts and rewrite their futures. A flame-haired mother, rendered mythical in memory, taken too soon by her unnatural hunger that has left her children starving. A creeping mist that envelops all who encounter it in the kind of ill luck that seems merely cruel in the moment but laughably pathetic in retrospect.

The mist is where things start to get supernatural, though even it could be explained away by the transformation of a land ravaged by coal mining, just like the mineral-heavy air that clogs Jasper’s lungs and the spreading stain over the river that everyone ignores but will never jump into. But then there’s the sentient house. It quickly becomes clear to Opal that Starling House is at least charmingly haunted, and then disturbingly so, and that it has something to do with The Underland, the collection of disturbing fairy tales written by E. Starling, which she hasn’t let herself indulge in since her mother Jewell drove their car into the river and drowned.

Opal is so fixated on snatches of her memory of Jewell that she fails to notice that she has two surrogate mothers in Bev, the surly hotel owner, and Charlotte, an out-of-towner who has temporarily posted up at the local library while researching her book about the dark history of Eden. In fact, there’s a lot that Opal doesn’t know, either because it’s cruelly kept from her or because she simply doesn’t want to acknowledge it.

Harrow excels at a story that enfolds other people’s stories within it; each retelling comes at a key point, and the style in which it is related teaches us something new about Eden and its history, while reflecting the tone and experiences of the teller. To that end, the novel’s footnotes immediately grab the reader’s attention, for how it quickly becomes clear that they are not Opal annotating her own narration, but someone else adding details. My only complaint is that they peter out far too soon; I would have loved for them to remain such a strong dimension throughout the entire book.

There is also, I was delighted to find, a thread of romance glinting through Starling House like a sparkly vein of ore. Opal and Arthur’s dynamic is what I imagine Wuthering Heights to be like, having never actually read the book but having Kate Bush’s ethereal ballad of the same name stuck in my head on repeat while reading: him stalking the limits of Starling House property, punching a pane of glass rather than let her into his heart, and her at the gates shouting it’s me, I’ve come home, I’m so cold, let me in your window.

Dual narration is typical of many romances, but blending first-person and third-person is more unusual. Harrow balances the perspectives with aplomb, with Opal stubbornly narrating every unsavory detail of her life as something of a challenge to the reader, yet clearly missing some key information, versus Arthur’s attempts at emotional distance when relating his own grievous failings as Warden of Starling House. It takes Opal’s prying into his life to spotlight his sacrifices (covering his body with tattooed runes) and his bravery (wielding a sword that isn’t even his birthright), wrenching open a space for forgiveness for both of them.

Though it’s a later-stage reveal, it hopefully isn’t too much of a spoiler to discuss one of the most heart-wrenching aspects of the book: that Starling House calls its Wardens to Eden, offering a home for the homeless. It’s such a poignant twist on the Gothic horror stories in which the reader marvels at why so many people would come to the same haunted house. Maybe in those tales the house is luring victims, but here it’s begging for people to keep the lights on. This unexpectedly emotional dimension amplifies Opal and Arthur’s climactic journey into the Underland, making you care about a couple descending into Hell in a way we haven’t since Orpheus and Eurydice. (Related: Harrow has written an excellent retelling of exactly this in a similar context, though its hopeful ending is painted much bleaker than Starling House’s more tender outcome.)

Harrow writes so stirringly about not just the unexpected joy of finding yourself in a story, but also the terror of it—of being perceived, of someone else layering their own impression upon your narrative, of having to transform from reader to protagonist. What an incredible accomplishment then, to have penned an absorbing book in which so many readers can behold themselves.

3.5/5 -- Rounded up. This was the perfect dark, eerie, atmospheric read. I saw it described somewhere as "cozy horror" and I think that description is so accurate! It felt like a Gothic Fairytale laced with elements of fantasy, horror and magical realism. The character of the Starling House itself was one of my favorite depictions of a haunted house ever. I really did enjoy our main character Opal and felt she was determined and brave. The reason for my rating is that I didn't really believe or enjoy the love story aspect as much as I thought I would. However, overall this book is spooky and unique and clever. I highly recommend reading the physical copy for the footnotes & illustrations.

Harrow has such a way of bringing magic into the world. This story was so intricate and woven together so well that I fell in love right from the start. I felt that the characters were written well and had a nice development throughout the story. The plot was mysterious and dark and kept you pulled in with every twist and turn. The world building was fun and beautiful. The magic system is absolutely brilliant, I loved the multi generational pull that the house had on different people. Over all this was the perfect book to kick off my 2024 reading!

There is just something about Harrow's writing that I'm obsessed with. Her worlds are so beautifully written and it's so easy to just fall into them. Opal and Arthur are such interesting characters and Starling House itself is such a fun character all its own. If you're a fan of The Hazel Wood, this has a very similar vibe, but ramped up to 100. this is not what I'd normally expect from the Reese Witherspoon bookclub, but it's a great gateway book into Harrow's writing.

who will rot with me in an old house made of dreams

These characters mean so much to me. Opal and Arthur are both so thorny and stubborn and unbearable and they take care of each other with so much determination that I couldn't stand it.

I love a haunted house story. And this one was even better because it was about a haunted house on the edge of a small town and the townspeople only know what amounts to myth about each new occupant of the house. They also know bad things happen in their town. And they blame it on the Starlings who own the haunted house.

The magic system of this book was such a creepy delight. I love sentient objects (houses, the whole town, etc.) and this one was no different. The house itself is maybe the most loveable character in the book. Opal is drawn to the house and becomes its caretaker all while Arthur - the last living Starling tries his best (it's not a very good best) to try to keep her away while he figures out how to end the house's magic.

It gets dark, it gets bloody, there are terrible rich people, there is some of the angstiest pining you will ever read. Alix E. Harrow writes books for people who want to be hurt and she does it well.

Would recommend to EVERYBODY!!!

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for my ARC!

Five stars, five stars, five stars. Alix E. Harrow never disappoints, and this magnificent new addition is no exception to that rule. From the perfectly-captured atmosphere of an Appalachian coal town to the vivid characters and their very real-life struggles in addition to their supernatural run=ins, I loved everything about "Starling House," and cannot wait to see what Harrow comes up with next. (I'll also be recommending it to literally everybody I know.)

Tenacity, bravery, and loyalty!
26yo Opal fiercely takes care of Jasper, her teenage brother, and has been his guardian since their mother drowned twelve years ago. Opal is bound and determined to give Jasper a promising future away from Eden, Kentucky. She earns money with part time jobs until she starts cleaning for Arthur Starling, the owner of Starling House. She knows there’s something off about the house but she doesn’t care. Opal just wants to earn money for Jasper to attend private school and Arthur pays nicely, even though the longer she stays there, the more she sees the strange goings on and can’t seem to pull herself away.

Likes/dislikes: I love Opal’s tenacity, bravery, and loyalty to her brother. The I was pulled into the story because of the mystery surrounding Starling House. I like how the author shared the background of the community, characters and Starling House.
Language: R for 172 swears and 63 f-words.
Mature Content: PG-13 for implied sex, off page.
Violence: PG-13 for self harm blood sacrifice.
Ethnicity: The ethnicity falls to white Jasper has a brown skin father.

I LOVED THIS BOOK SO MUCH!!

This story was the perfect blend of fantasy and gothic. It felt so atmospheric and engaging, I had such a hard time putting this one down! Although the action was slow burn, the stakes felt so high that the pacing felt quick. I loved Opal’s feistiness and bravery, and I was so happy to get to spend this time with her.

Alix E. Harrow has such a knack for world-building. I have loved every single book of hers and I can’t wait for more!

I cannot believe I forgot to review this. This was one of my favourite reads of last year! I love the growth of the main character, I loved the darkness, I loved the slow burn romance!! It was creepy and beautiful and I devoured it!

I ushered in winter’s first frost with Alix E. Harrow’s STARLING HOUSE (Tor, 320 pp., $28.99), which is perfect for when you want that Shirley Jackson creepy manor sauce drizzled over the small-town romance plot, in a way that’s probably not healthy but is absolutely delicious.

Some people say the bad luck in Eden, Ky., is just the usual accidents and environmental damage of mining coal. But others blame Starling House, built by the author of a children’s book featuring eerie beasts who are all mist and teeth.

Opal, an orphan, can’t care about the rumors: She’s too busy cobbling together a semblance of a life in a local motel, where she’s raising her younger brother, Jasper. She refuses to let this bright young man spend the rest of his life wheezing in a town that only worsens the asthma it gave him.

So when a series of ill-advised rebellions leads her to the doorstep of Starling House — Opal is furious and unscrupulous in a way that’s a joy to behold — she talks her way into a job as the housekeeper.

Arthur Starling, the house’s owner, is reticent with his words but overly, suspiciously generous with wages and gifts. It’s almost like he’s trying to repay a debt. Possibly it involves the many graves on the house’s grounds, or the sword he carries around at night, though Opal is supposed to leave the house before sunset. Opal’s never been good at following the rules, though — and the more Arthur tries to push her away, the closer she wants to get.

Harrow has shuffled the familiar Gothic motifs like an adroit Vegas dealer. Opal is the meddling, sullen housekeeper rather than the innocent new wife or governess; there is a catastrophic fire, but not where you’d expect; the house is threatening and powerful, but not half as sinister as the mining company’s representative. It’s a gorgeous, vicious howl of a story, and if I had a time machine I would have already given a copy to my younger self.

This book was magical! I couldn't stop reading it.

When Opal was younger she was endlessly fascinated by the mysterious Starling House that has a long history of creepy and interesting stories about it and it's inhabitants. She would dream about it often but when her mother dies tragically she can no longer live in fantasy. Presently, Opal lives in a motel in a dying town with her younger brother that she cares for. Opal is doing all she can to keep them afloat and to hopefully save enough money to get her brother out of the town. But when she gets a job offer to work in THE Starling House she knows that nothing good can come from this but decides to take the job anyway. With each work day that passes she starts to feel like Starling House is her home and gets more pulled in by the odd owner. However, strange and dangerous things also start to happen.

The writing of this book is so beautiful. Many parts of this book are not beautiful but instead ugly and heartbreaking but it's impossible to not invest in the characters, the town, and the house from Alix E. Harrow's writing. I very much enjoyed how there was a fairy tale mixed with some true crime lore surrounding this house. And the house is a character in itself.

I really enjoyed this book. I actually couldn’t stop thinking about it while I was at work and read as much as I could on my breaks. It’s an enchanted story about a young woman who is not what she seems or who she thinks she is. As the story progresses, she becomes more of the person she really is and learns about herself and her surroundings. She finds out she’s stronger than she knows and she fights terrifying beasts to save the ones she loves. It’s a fantastic, magical story. I loved it!