trigger warnings for content of novel: mild gore, blood & violence, mild body horror.

oh, man. i’m a little conflicted on this book. while i do like complexities of the mother-daughter relationship portrayed, and while i did think it was a good study of how abuse, no matter it be physical, verbal or just substance, can affect a child’s life, i just did not feel like it was that engaging. let me explain.

bitter is the heart follows TAMAR, who takes in her elderly mother RUTH following her expelling from an elderly home, apparently due to violence and misbehaviour towards other residents. left with no choice, tamar, who refuses to let her younger sister near the mother that has abused her all her life, allows her to live with her until she can find another home for ruth. what follows is several weeks of horror, mystery, and almost psychedelic-like terror. what has plagued tamar the most during her childhood has returned to haunt her— and this time, she’s not so sure it’s human, anymore. or maybe it hasn’t been all this time, and that’s the most confounding bit of it all.

on paper, this is a fascinating premise. i adore works commenting on mother-daughter relationships, abuse and trauma, and this fit the bill. but it didn’t live up to my expectations. let’s get into why.

1) a major issue for me was the pacing. this is a little over 300 pages, but it dragged quite a bit at the middle and start. it picks up towards the end, but if that’s the only redeeming point about a book’s pacing, then it’s a sign the book may be struggling in this department, which i thought it was. for most of this book, i was intrigued— i was waiting for things to pick up, i was waiting for a moment that would truly pack a punch, but it unfortunately never really came until about 60%(?) percent in, when [SPOILERS] ruth cut tamar’s hair and swallowed it. now that was the true horror i was looking for, especially in a book tagged as such. [END SPOILERS]

2) ruth’s switch between coherency and [SPOILERS] being lost to the presence of the dybbak was a little confusing to me. while it definitely was alluded towards to that ruth was not entirely human and that perhaps possession was in play, it was not all that clear for me to genuinely understand that there were two voices speaking out of ruth, one of the actual woman and the other of the demon. i only really understood this towards the end and had a bit of a oh, THAT’S why moment. [END SPOILERS]

3) i wish the dybbak’s origins, history and powers etc had been explored a bit more. it’s a fascinating concept to me. an eldritch horror living in female vessels, passed down from generation to generation, woman to woman? generational trauma in the form of love and hatred? sign me UP. however, this fell short. the reveal of the [SPOILER] demon was done fine, nothing noteworthy, but i was curious about how exactly the dybbak came to be, it’s place in jewish belief &. mythology, why it needs women as its hosts and things like that. the book did not explain that at all. it didn’t even really tell us what a dybbak is. [END SPOILERS] it just sort of named the creature, and left us to connect the context clues. the ending was a little abrupt as well. the ending line could’ve been a different one to really pack a punch, because i thought this one lacked impact.

overall, though, i did enjoy this. it was a decent read. despite the pacing issues and some questions left unanswered, it was entertaining. thank you for the opportunity to read this ARC! 3 stars.