Impossible Causes is played out on the Island of Lark, an isolated community with limited access to the world beyond their shores. To outside eyes Lark islanders live a safe, religious and idyllic existence and this attracts three newcomers, Deborah Kendrick and her teenage daughter, Viola and a new male teacher, Ben.
As the story develops we gradually learn that as well a religion playing a strong part in the Islanders lives there is also a history of paganism and witchcraft. Men rule the Lark, with women for the most part being treated as the weaker sex. As a reader you realise that this isn't the case, and through the twists and turns of the story the real truth of life on Lark is revealed under tragic circumstances. The story plays out right to the very last page.
I was given a copy of Impossible Causes to read by NetGalley and the publishers in turn for an unbiased review.

‘Impossible Causes’ was touted to me as a sort of feminist version of The Wicker Man. An isolated community that an outsider stumbles into full of witchcraft and murder. Sounds pretty great right? I was quick to request it and then I started to see a lot of low star reviews appear. Not one to let others sway my opinion I dived into the book with an open mind and was sorely disappointed.

Although a great concept, the book is very poorly executed. We dive into different perspectives as chapters change character narration and timelines repeatedly. Although this can be a nice way of creating tension and drawing out the plot in some books, here this just muddled and confused everything to the point where I had no idea what was really going on for a good 60% of the book.

The plot keeps all of its cards so close to its chest that the big reveal at the end of the book comes from nowhere. You spend the entire book trying to work out the motivations of The Elder Girls and why they are drastically overreacting to everything because the real reasons aren’t even hinted at. It means that you can’t really root or sympathise with them until about 400 pages in which is way too late. You also wait out the entire book to find out who the dead body is that is presented in the first few pages and by the time it’s revealed you are well past caring. Some bits of the world building also made no sense – I didn’t understand about the significance of hair colour on the island, for example.

The island to me didn’t really feel like this ‘female driven community’ that was stated in the blurb. The women are annoying and two dimensional, despite having chapters written from two female perspectives we don’t really learn enough about them to make a difference. I didn’t have any empathy for anyone involved and left with no one to care about I just found myself skimming the pages. I started powering through the book desperate to just get it finished which is a sure sign of a one star review.

Overall Impossible Causes could have been a great book but for me the confusion and vagueness of what was going on left it so hard to sympathise with any of the characters and ultimately let it down. Thank you to NetGalley & Bloomsbury Publishing PLC – Raven Books for a chance to read the ARC in exchange for a (very!) honest review.

This was really interesting for the most part but there were a few moments that lagged and I think could have been a bit better. Viola was the most compelling character and I cared more about her perspective than Leah's. Leah's was fine but the author could have done so much more with her than what happened. The ending portion did at least offer something unexpected that I liked and thought worked well with the situation and characters. One blurb i've seen calls this witchy and it's not really. It's more atmospheric and gothic because of how oppressive it is, not because of any supernatural going-ons.

I absolutely loved this book. It has everything I enjoy reading about; a mystery, a disorientating setting, a secret and clever plotting.

Set on Lark, a remote island off the UK coast that cannot be reached for 6 months of the year, Impossible Causes is a wonderfully dark book which shines a spotlight on a close-knit community. The inhabitants of Lark are steeped in tradition and religion, they dress conservatively, have their own laws and rules and don’t have TV, radio or mobile phones. They live in a kind of old fashioned world where the 21st Century is yet to find their shores.

When one of the few boats which reaches the island brings three new inhabitants feathers are ruffled. Viola and her mother are escaping a seismic event in their lives, both are filled with grief and despair and Lark is an opportunity for them to start their lives again. Viola is welcomed into the arms of the Eldest Girls, three girls who are in the last year of school and who have been brought up in a very religious and structured way. Viola’s bright red hair completes the group, with one of them being blonde, another brunette and the third having the jet black hair of true Lark inhabitants. Viola joins their group and they take themselves off to the stone circle and dabble with the occult, make offerings to the Gods to try and summon the Furies.

The third new inhabitant is school teacher Ben Hailley whose arrival piques the interest of most of the islanders. He is young and attractive and he catches the eye of naive Leah Cedars, a Lark born teacher. He brings an iPhone which he cannot use but it contains music she has never heard before and he uses it to take photographs of the bleak but beautiful landscape. She is the daughter of the gamekeeper, a taciturn man who is a member of the council and she as a true Lark family she is expected to marry and continue the Lark way of life.

This book took me completely by surprise. It opens with a body being found at the stone circle and then jumps back in time to the arrival of Viola, her mother and Ben on the island. It took me a little while to get into the narrative structure and I found it a little disjointed. Leah is written in the first person and it is through her that we discover Lark and its traditions and rituals. It makes for fascinating reading and Julie Mayhew has done a wonderful job in world building an isolated island with its close-knit community. They felt wholly real and there is an overarching sense of something not being right and foreboding at its heart. Viola though is more difficult to connect with and I really feel that had she too been written in the first person I would’ve felt I knew her more, she felt just out of my grasp.

It is worth persevering though as the pay off is wonderful. Julie Mayhew is an incredibly talented writer and Lark and its inhabitants became increasingly creepy as the book continued. It is a community filled with secrets and rituals. Paganism mixes with Christianity, a member of the community is seen as a devil worshipper for using tarot cards and The Eldest Girls proclivity for dancing naked at the stone circles is viewed with suspicion. It is a place ruled by fear, superstitions, unwritten rules and traditions and this combined with its isolation for much of the year combines to make Lark a forbidding and brutal place to be.

But what of the body? Who is it? Have they been murdered? Although it opens with a death the book didn’t feel like a crime thriller. It is wholly unsettling and at times upsetting. I was blindsided by some of the events, even though they were hinted at, I just chose not to see them. This is an interesting and compelling book which I would recommend to those who enjoy feeling slightly off kilter, a close-knit community and a sense of doom.

In theory, this is a great idea but the way it's written is rather messy and frustrating. Violet and the "Elder Girls" are annoying characters and the modern parallels in the climax are rather too heavy-handed. I did like the character of Leah and the setting. But overall not really a success.

I don't really understand the negative reviews of this book. The narrative does switch between past and present, but not in a confusing way. It is cleverly written and the author manages to keep the reader intrigued from the first page. Despite the somewhat open ending, I found Impossible Causes to be gripping and satisfying, and I loved the feminist themes running through the book. The characters are realistic and flawed, and the prose tight and intense.

I really did not enjoy this book at all. I struggled getting into it and it was over very quickly without me really getting into the story. Others may enjoy it but it’s not a book for me.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for the ARC in return for an honest and unbiased opinion.

The story is set on Lark, an island that is largely cut off from Mainland Britain for a large part of the year. The Community is very religious set in their ways with a strange mix of dogmatic Christianity & Paganism. Into this comes three newcomers; Viola & her mother wanting to get away from a family tragedy & Ben- a young charismatic science teacher that is bound to stir up the large female population. The school is small & the three'Eldest Girls' are seen as very important. The story is told in part by Leah, one of the teachers in the school. The story line jumps about a bit, but starts with a body of a young man in a stone circle so the reader has a good idea who it belongs to.

I should have loved this book as it had all the right ingredients for me, It was well written, atmospheric & claustrophobic, but somehow it didn't turn out as I hoped. It was rather bitty & I found it difficult to like any of the characters.

Thanks to Netgalley & the publisher for letting me read & review this book.

“How contagious evil can be... dressed in the guise of justice”

This is an odd one, a unique one.

The writing style has a feeling of the action, the characters, the story, all being behind a pane of frosted glass that the reader is trying to peer through. Everything is just slightly semantically obscured in a way that has a dreamlike effect, almost as if the story is taking place on a different plane of reality.

Everything that is, except for the setting. The location is so perfectly described, and the slightly opaque writing style adds to a very particular mood. I can picture the stormy Atlantic island of Lark so perfectly, even as I feel no connection to the characters within. The claustrophobia, the superstition (both of modern and more ancient religious sorts), the paranoia... it all comes together to paint a vivid picture of a remote community.

We are introduced to the isolated island of Lark through the eyes of newcomer Viola Kendrick and her mother. Paralleled with their arrival is another "coycrock" in the form of a new teacher, Ben Hailey. The suspicion awarded to these outsides adds another layer to the setting and fuels much of the story.

The most interesting theme throughout for me was the spreading of rumours within a small, isolated community. There are essentially three voices in this book - Viola's point-of-view chapters, Leah's first person chapters, with the third voice being the whisper of gossip travelling like wildfire across the island. This resulted in a strong point about the dangers of a secret known by a whole community, that is deliberately "forgotten", and how that only leads to more victims of its truth over time.

The Eldest Girls – largely the focus of the story – feel unknowable outside of the gossip. Even as Viola gets close to them, they’re talked about from a distance. Until the final few chapters, no interactions are even witnessed by the reader between Viola and the girls in an active way – occasionally they're mentioned as passive anecdotes. This kept them mysterious and added intrigue to the story – are they really witches? are they evil? what are they trying to achieve? – but I do feel like as a result, some understanding of their motive was sacrificed.

This book took me a long time to get into. The first half - it didn't drag, but it didn't remotely grip me, either, and the constant changes not only of point-of-view but of timeline too didn't help this. And then I reached about the halfway point, and everything changed. I had to force myself to go to bed after cramming in an hour or two of reading at the end of a busy day, because otherwise I would have stayed up all night to finish it.

Two scenes in particular hit me pretty hard. One a poignant uprising, and one a tragic twist. Both are towards the end of the book, so I shan't spoil, however they are reason alone to keep reading if you find the book a little difficult to get into.

As for a rating, I found this hard to decide upon one. I really wouldn't be surprised if months down the line, I return and change the star rating, depending on how the book sits with me after I've had time to let it stew a little.

For now, I'll go with 3.5/5, rounded up to 4.

Impossible Causes is Julie Mayhew's first foray into writing for adults. Set on an isolated island miles from the coast of the UK, it's accessible only by ferry, and only in the summer months. Told over the course of a winter, between the last ferry in Autumn and the first the following April, the story jumps between times and between characters, never lingering too long in one spot, contributing to the tense, claustrophobic feel of the island and the community on it.
Lots of really interesting stuff in here, but I think there were too many characters to fully delve into the mindsets of the Larkians and the coycrocks, or outsiders. Shifting perspectives also made for jarring transitions between chapter sections, and it took me a long time to figure out what the actual timeline was.
However, the book itself is still wonderfully atmospheric and spooky, with elements of witchcraft intertwined with elements of hysteria. It reminded me of Sanctuary by VV James, and in a good way. Perfectly pitched for an October read, with a cloying, claustrophobic atmosphere that seemed at times almost too tense to handle, the tension oozed off the pages, with assumptions being made regularly, none of them ever being right. A source of frustration throughout the book was that nobody ever seemed to just talk openly, but that frustration felt very real - in a close, restricted community, everything is communicated in what's left unsaid, the assumptions that are made and the whispers behind people's backs.
Rising tension as we approached the climax of the book left me feeling jumpy every time I picked it up, afraid for what was going to come next, but it didn't quite hit the mark for me as it climaxed, and I was left deflated and a tiny bit disappointed. But not enough to not enjoy this spooky, witchy book, and look out for more from Mayhew in the future.

I am sorry i did not finish this book, i could not connect well with the story and it was a DNF for me.

Lark is an island with it's own very unique ways and rules. Cut off from the rest of the world it moves at it's own pace. Only twice a year is there visits from the mainland, one journey bringing three new arrivals set to turn the island on its head but just what is truly going on,

The premise of this story sounded really good but in not sure it quite lived up to it. The story was interesting but it jumped around a lot. At times it was a bit confusing to figure out where each chapter fit. It was also told in part by Leah which I found interesting. She was an unusual character but her development was so well written. I couldn't get to grips with Violam she just came across as a brat throughout the story. The ending was clever and tied the story up, fitting with current situations in the world. I also would have liked more from the perspective of the Elder Girls as they are such a huge part of the story. An interesting read but a little too disjointed for me.

For me, Impossible Causes leant far more towards the hysteria of The Crucible than any whiff of darkly funny, teen Halloween flick, The Craft. And, do not get me wrong, I love witches in all of their forms but this was far more about the small-minded allegations of the bored townspeople, than a group of young girls kicking arse and casting spells. The gossip (and really, the entire tone of the novel), therefore, alongside the preoccupation on religion, misogyny and 'reputation', felt far more realistic to the late-1600s than any part of the United Kingdom in the twenty-first century. Where, after-all, were any hints of the year 2017 apart from the vague, shoved-in references to the latest iPhone? Where were the hexes, the spells, the familiars? With an eerie setting and a wonderful reference pool this could have been an instant Halloween hit, but unfortunately, Impossible Causes created more horror out of the banality of small-town life than anything remotely to do with the supernatural.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for sending me an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

I struggled to get into this book. I wanted to like it, but it just didn’t work for me. The multiple narratives were confusing at times, although I did appreciate the different perspectives of life on the island. Some of the characters weren’t explored as much as I’d have liked, such as Viola and the Eldest Girls – I felt like I never really got to know them.

I thought the big secret was fairly obvious, but I was interested to see how it would be revealed and how the islanders would react.

I didn’t get a sense of tension, nor did I find the book particularly atmospheric, which was a shame as I liked the setting of the isolated island.

I think some people will love this book. Sadly, I’m not one of them.

I didn't find that this book was for me, i didn't enjoy the writing style and didn't feel that I connected with any of the characters. I can see why the story would appeal to some but it did not appeal to me

Impossible Causes is a book that caught me completely off-guard. It touts itself as a thriller but it is that and so much more; Julie Mayhew is an author to watch. This is a tense tale of isolation, witchcraft and murder with a very thought-provoking and accurate message about the insidious nature of rumour, gossip and suspicion. Set on the fictional and extremely remote North Atlantic island of Lark we are treated to a richly Gothic and often uncomfortably religious atmosphere which felt rather cult-like in its ways. The twists and turns in the plot get darker as you move through the book and it is beautifully written. However, I feel there were too many characters that were unnecessary to the plot and the multiple threads made the narrative a little too busy and confusing to some.

If you can overlook the difficulty in immersing yourself in the story at the beginning then you will find you are rewarded by a creepy, hypnotic tale which is both clever and original. It's is a potent mix of mystery, crime, religion, dystopia and paranormal and I was gripped by the unease between the Christian and Pagan religions on the island. Despite the minor issues I enjoyed Impossible Causes with its quasi-feminist undertones and odd structure. The Eldest Girls and the teacher, the main characters, were superbly developed and, like everyone in this book, were intriguing. I honestly believe that it could've been much more chilling and effective had it been edited down a bit and the story tightened up, but on a positive note I know I will remember the atmosphere. Many thanks to Raven Books for an ARC.

I liked the concept and Leah's chapters but struggled to connect with Viola and the Eldest Girls. The ending was clever but it took a long time getting there.

My thanks to Bloomsbury Publishing U.K./Raven Books for an eARC via NetGalley of Julie Mayhew’s ‘Impossible Causes’ in exchange for an honest review.

The novel opens on Friday 13, April 2018 with the discovery of the body of a man in a Neolithic stone circle on the island of Lark in the North Atlantic. The island is cut off due to the weather for seven months of the year. This small deeply religious community of under 300 strictly controls who comes to live there and doesn’t embrace technology so no mobile phones or internet.

We move back to June 2017 as Deborah Kendrick and her daughter, Viola, come live there to escape a tragedy in their past. In the autumn the arrival of a young science teacher, Ben, causes a stir among students and others. He becomes secretly involved with fellow teacher, Leah.

There is a strange rather creepy attitude towards women in the community; especially three sixteen year old girls, who are known as the Elder Girls. They regularly meet up at the stone circle to apparently practice witchcraft. Viola is drawn to the Elder Girls and hopes to join their circle. We slowly learn about the events leading up to and beyond Friday 13th.

The synopsis for this book excited me as the publisher described it as: “The Crucible meets The Craft in this brilliantly dark thriller about isolated communities, rumours and suspicion.” The idea of an isolated island with a history of paganism also brought to mind ‘The Wicker Man’ and so I hoped for folk horror but found that it was quite a different experience.

I usually am not daunted by different timelines and multiple perspectives but here the constant switching about in time and narrative viewpoints left me feeling confused. I also found it difficult to connect to the characters. I didn’t feel that the Elder Girls emerged as individuals at all though this might have been the deliberate intention of the author.

The author’s use of Tarot trumps to mark the chapters intrigued me and I wondered if there was a narrative link between them and the chapter contents.

Overall, I felt disappointed though I did generally feel more engaged during the final chapters, which made me wonder if it was a matter of getting in synch with her style and dropping my expectations created by the synopsis.

So I plan to return to it in a while and read at a more leisurely pace, likely in conjunction with its audiobook edition , keeping in mind those potent symbols from the Tarot as I do so.

However, at present I am giving it 3 stars. This may be amended after rereading.

Impossible Causes is set on the remote island of Lark, cut off entirely from the main land for the winter months. It’s a small, religious community that is deeply suspicious of outsiders. Viola and her mother move to Lark to get away from their past, and try to understand the strange rules and hierarchies of their new home. At the same time, a new teacher, Ben, comes to the island’s school, a young man who seems to cause a real stir and captures the attention of fellow teacher Leah, a Lark born and bred. All the characters are preoccupied with the behaviour of The Eldest Girls, a trio of teenagers whose behaviour grows increasingly strange as the months wear on. With accusations flying and people suspecting everything from impure behaviour to witchcraft, the plot twists and turns with growing darkness.

It is sometimes hard to follow, asking the reader to keep track of a lot of characters who may or may not turn out to be key later on, and juggling many elements, but the atmosphere and isolation of the small island community was is deeply effective.

An example for me of a book I think and hope is going to go one way, as that’s why I picked it up before Halloween and one which goes another way so that I check the blurb and reviews to see if it’s the same book I thought of.

A great plot about a very deserted and luckily fictional, island in the middle of nowhere (more so than your average remote island)

This island is interesting - mainly women who make up the community on it. The men who are there act as the masters and really look down on the women, patting their heads and treating them as, well, slaves. The men are just after one thing as as soon as the younger ones reach sixteen…..Urgh this was an awful part of the story that made me uncomfortable. There’s a strange religion apparent too although this is underdeveloped and I really wanted to know more about this and how it affected those underneath its spell. There is something they’re all under however…maybe something they all drink in the only pub on the island.
Weird and uncomfortable.