I’m sure this is a fine horror story, but I stopped reading when a scene came up that contained casual animal torture and abuse. I am seeing this more often in recent fiction. I believe a great story can be told without adding gratuitous animal torture/injury to it and will not condone it under any circumstances.
Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for an ARC in exchange for my honest opinion.

Thankyou to NetGalley, Crooked Lane Books and the author, Jo Kaplan, for the opportunity to read an advanced readers copy of It Will Just Be Us in exchange for an honest and unbiased opinion.
I was hooked from the start.
The storyline was well thought out and written with intriguing characters. The atmosphere was chilling and deliciously creepy. I read this book in one sitting as I could not put it down.
Well worth a read for fans of the genre.

The kindle version of this book is poorly formatted which negatively affected my initial impressions of this book. I'm sure I missed some important nuances in the lyrical weaving of past, future, and present events that inhabit the house and haunt our main characters. Nevertheless once I made it through the first quarter or so, narrative and style grabbed my attention and the mystery and horror of the story sucked me in.

Second book back to back I am first to read and review on GR. Lovely. This one had me at gothic something. Just seems like a pleasantly spooky read, even going by the cover alone. But apparently one mustn’t judge the book by the cover, even though it’s so easy and often accurate, so let’s judge the innards instead. Let’s say We Have Always Lived in this Castle And the legend of Winchester mansion had a baby. Weird, sure, but go with it. This is that baby. It’s a scary creepy kid, much like the boy ghost that haunts the book. So now you know what to expect…two sisters (and their mother) live in a giant rambling haunted old mansion that was built gradually and systematically until the floor plans abandoned all pretense at logic and coherence. The mansion has a built in Netflix of sorts, projecting memories in 3D at random. Past and now future generations of Wakefields’ lives play out for the current Wakefields, day and night. It was challenging enough when it was just Sam and her shut in mother, living quietly away from the world at the edge of the awesomely named Great Dismal swamp. Sam even got to play around with their witchy reputation on her brief excursions into town. But now Sam’s heavily pregnant sister, Elizabeth, left her abusive spouse to stay with her family. And now there’s a new ghost, a young faceless boy, to contend with. And that’s all before Elizabeth’s betrothed comes to stay, bringing his own irascibility and violence into an already combustible mix. So there you have it…a story about a family and their ghosts. A well told story, as atmospheric and eerie as you’d expect from a modern gothic. Very well written and all that, but you can’t give it any high ratings on the originality score. In fact it borrows juts too heavily from two iconic sources, too much to be offset by the author’s own embellishments and touches, however clever and interesting those might be. This is especially noticeable because both of the other stories have been recently made into movies, so they are really fresh in my mind. So maybe this one should be read as a pastiche of sorts. That might work. Or if you are not familiar with either of the either stories or watched the movies, that would work too. The story is striking and would be appropriately haunting had it been a genuine original. Still, a nice read for a dark night. Fans of quiet slow literary scares should enjoy this one. Thanks Netgalley.

Kaplan takes a little bit of Hill House and a little bit of the Winchester mansion and comes up with Wakefield Hall, in this Southern Gothic that kept me reading all night. Sam has come back to her ancestral home to live with her mother, and they are shortly joined by Sam’s heavily pregnant sister, Elizabeth. Sam and her family are able to “see” memories. And watch their ancestors walk though the house going about their business; they even see younger versions of themselves. Unusual, but the “ghosts” seem to be merely recordings of events past. They do not interact with Sam and her family and seem unaware of their presence. That all changes when Elizabeth arrives and Sam begins seeing a young boy, one who takes pleasure in killing animals. The boy is even able to interact with the past, killing one of Sam’s ancestors right in front of her. The boy reaches out to Sam too, calling her auntie and she becomes convinced the boy is Julian, the child her sister is about to give birth to. It’s clear that the boy is a monster, but how far will Sam go to make sure “Julian” can never hurt anyone? This is one of the most intelligent, well written horror stories I’ve ever read and it scare the crap out of me. Highly recommended