The Girl from Rawblood was my first Catriona Ward book. So many unexpected things (no spillers). I loved the creep factor of the story and the way things completely wrapped at the end. Brilliance ! I read 2 of her other books, & have become a huge fan of her writing.

I was given this book for review purposes. All opinions are mine alone.

I both enjoyed and was confounded by the way the story looped around. The ending speaks to the beginning nicely, but I wasn’t always able to follow where the story was going. This book made me appreciate the nonlinear narratives of Emily St. John Mandel even more. The past is the ghost of the present.

Rawblood is strained, problematic and riddled with mistakes - or, if not mistakes, serious errors in continuity. Didn't find it scary, or creepy but I did find I grew increasingly aggravated trying to workout how to keep all the threads from unraveling.

I really enjoyed this book. The time jumping would confuse me at times, but it was necessary to bring the story about in such a flooring way. Excellent ending, and what a ride along the way. Still haven’t anything to replace the feeling I had when I was reading this. Woooosh.

"Winner of BEST HORROR NOVEL (August Derleth Award) at British Fantasy Awards 2016.

For generations the Villarcas have died mysteriously, and young. Now Iris and her father will finally understand why...

At the turn of England's century, as the wind whistles in the lonely halls of Rawblood, young Iris Villarca is the last of her family's line. They are haunted, through the generations, by "her," a curse passed down through ancient blood that marks each Villarca for certain heartbreak, and death.

Iris forsakes her promise to her father, to remain alone, safe from the world. She dares to fall in love, and the consequences of her choice are immediate and terrifying. As the world falls apart around her, she must take a final journey back to Rawblood where it all began and where it must all end...

From the sun dappled hills of Italy to the biting chill of Victorian dissection halls, The Girl from Rawblood is a lyrical and haunting historical novel of darkness, love, and the ghosts of the past."

Firstly, if it wins an August Derleth Award I'm honor bound to promote it. Secondly, come on, this sounds awesome!

The Villarca family has lived in Rawblood, a great Gothic mansion isolated in the bogs and mists of Dartmoor, for generations untold. The Villarcas are also haunted by… something. Exactly what it is depends on which generation of the Villarcas you ask: the ghost of a murdered woman, a curse, a predisposition to madness with episodes brought on by strong emotions, an autoimmune disease, a tendency to sicken and pine if they move away from the house of Rawblood, a history of murdering those they love.

The story is told in segments from different slices of the family's history, though at every moment the characters think they are the last of the bloodline, not realizing the reader has already met their descendants. In 1910 we have Iris Villarca, a young girl living alone with her father and Tom Gilmore, the stableboy she is closer to than she should be. As she grows older a series of tragedies condemn her to an insane asylum, where she rots in the care of doctors more concerned with the larger devastation of World War I than with her. In 1881, Alonso Villarca is determined to solve his family’s problems through medical science, a goal that drives him to experiments involving vivisection, opium, blood, and a notable lack of ethics. In 1839, Mary Hopewell fades away from consumption in Italy, living on an independence that just barely keeps her above poverty. She doesn’t know, of course, that she will soon meet Don Villarca, who will marry her and buy back her long-lost childhood home of Rawblood. There are other narrators too: Meg (someday to become Iris’s mother but when we meet her enduring a childhood raised by strangers and believing herself to have the powers of a witch), Charles Danforth (Alonso’s companion in medical experiments, who sees the ghost Alonso swears isn’t there), Tom Gilmore’s letters from the trenches, and nameless Villarcas back into the dark depths of history, medieval monks and tattooed pagans. All of these stories interrupt and influence one another, circling around family secrets and unavoidable consequences and the connections across generations. The future and the past become indistinguishable, and by the end of the book time has circled back on itself.

For all the obvious horror tropes – a haunted house! a ghost! a witch! – I wouldn’t really call this a horror novel. It’s not particularly interested in scaring the reader. Instead, more than anything, it’s a tragedy. And a tragedy in quite the classical sense: you’re told right at the beginning how it’s all going to end painfully, and yet the characters keep making the choices you know they have to make, setting the plot on unbending tracks toward the inevitable crash. There’s a bit of a mystery in figuring out what exactly haunts the Villarcas, but the central pull of the book isn’t in solving those clues (though I do have to say that I absolutely love the ultimate reveal), but simply in the loss and sadness of their downfall, and Iris’s in particular. Her loneliness, her trauma, the way she is both abandoned to her fate and the creator of that same fate – ah, it’s great.

I absolutely loved this book. It has a very Victorian feel in some ways – the setting, the ruin of a noble house, the situations of the characters – but the author has set very modern eyes on these old tropes, giving them a new and powerful turn. I really recommend it.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2150419982

This was was very well-written and atmospheric! The only thing I didn't like about the book was that it was slow moving. Still, I recommend this for fans of The Woman in Black.

Gorgeously written, so true to the origins of the Gothic horror genre.

A creepy and satisfying story. Always great to come across a new gothic!

This was a difficult read. By jumping between characters, and often giving no indication of the connections for multiple pages, it was easy to become confused.

The blurb of "The Girl from Rawblood" sounded really intriguing, especially since it promised to be a classic Gothic tale but, unfortunately, I just couldn't get into the story. The writing didn't really suck me in and something about the style was off-putting. The different sections were written differently enough to tell the characters apart and I liked some more than others but overall, this novel just didn't really suit my tastes. The story seemed all over the place at times, none of characters was particularly sympathetic, and the ending was rather confusing and, at least for me, unsatisfying.

I did like the narrative weaving back and forth between past and present, shedding more light on characters that came before Iris and Tom, as well as the atmosphere of Rawblood, both stifling and inviting to nostalgia. I had more trouble keeping interested in the story itself, though: the characters weren’t particularly engaging, so I never cared much about them. I never really felt the connection between Iris and Tom, and therefore its role in the ‘immediate and terrifying’ consequences mentioned in the blurb didn’t have much of an impact

The present tense narration tended to throw me out of the story from time to time, which didn’t help; I’m not sure why, I’m not too keen on that tense when it comes to historical fiction (and/or when several narrators are involved, as it’s often difficult to tell who’s telling the story, and it was the case here at times).

The reveal towards the end made sense in a way, yet seemed to me like it fell a little abruptly, and wasn’t completely… justified. Revenge? But why, considering ‘her’ identity, why would she inflict that on the Villarcas? Accident, couldn’t help it? Hm, not really convinced here. Quite a few things were unclear, and not in a way that contributed to a mysterious / gothic atmosphere.

Conclusion: I may have liked it more, if not for the style and the characters.

Not my usual choice of reading but found myself glued to it.

I tried but this just wasn't for me and I DNF. I'm not sure why the plot seemed so nonsensical and the characters so unappealing but they were. This would have benefited from a strong edit to clean and tighten.

Received an advance reader copy in exchange for a fair review.
Thanks to Edelweiss, NetGalley and Sourcebooks for the opportunity to read and review The Girl from RawBlood by Catriona Ward. Iris lives with her Papa in the house called RawBlood. This house has been in their family for generations and the family members supposedly have a disease called Horror autotoxicus. They are supposed to live by a strict set of rules, one of which states, "no friends ". The story splits between past and present and dives into the sordid history of RawBlood. The prose is reminiscent of classical writing and brings the reader into that atmosphere with a Gothic feel. Vivisection, drugs, hallucinations and dysfunctional relationships help the story move forward into the horror genre. Even though the story line is somewhat confusing, the disjointed feeling also helps with the oddities and creepiness of the story. 4 stars.

Struggled to get stuck in to this book, not sure why as it has all the makings of a great book - I'll try it again at a later date!

This is in the first place an attempt to write a classic gothic tale.A family,living in a lonely manor on Dartmoor , haunted by "something".
All the right ingredients for a gothic success story and yet...the first part,although confusing due to several different timelines, was mysterious enough to keep one's attention but then the book becomes even more incoherent and messy and seems to lose all purpose...
The story (if ever there was one)is completely lost. Too bad, because it has the right building stones ....

Thank you to publishers and Netgalley for my free preview copy in return for an honest review.

Despite being a Victorian Gothic horror story with a big rambling mansion, a family curse, a ghost and a handsome groomsman, all the factors to a great horror story, this novel did nothing for me.

At times reading it was like dragging through the mire. It went all over the place and sometimes it was hard to follow what was going on. I guessed the apparent ‘twist’ at the end fairly early on in the novel and that irked me. Especially when I got to the end and the twist was something I had known all along.

I would give it two and half stars but I can’t so its two stars really was just not my ‘cuppa tea’.

This novel can be a bit confusing because it is not a linear story. Each chapter is written by a different person who has been affected by "her". In order to read this novel, you need to pay careful attention or else you will find yourself utterly lost. That being said, I found the story to be highly engrossing. I enjoyed putting the pieces together and seeing how the Villarca curse has affected those in the Villarca family line, as well as those who aren't directly a part of this family. I liked the fact that the story didn't flow smoothly; I enjoyed the jarring effect of being caught up in one story just to be yanked out and put into another. It made the reading of this novel so much fun! I also quite liked the way the author resolved the issue of the curse and how she ended everything. This novel definitely gave me chills here and there but it made me think more than anything. Overall, a really interesting ghost story that I enjoyed very much!