“The problem has always been the way he left them alone in the house for long periods, the way he spoke to his daughters, the way he pitted one against the other—left each to struggle for a love they should have known they couldn’t earn.”

A reimagining of Shakespeare’s King Lear with a climate fiction backdrop, this book is positively brimming with the deep, chilling, and slightly-suffocating-in-the-best-way prose that I’ve come to expect with Armfield’s work.

The story revolves around three sisters who have very complicated relationships with each other, as they grapple with the death of their father. We are treated to each of their perspectives, and it’s fascinating to see how they view each other and the situations they find themselves in. Each of their personal lives are a bit (or a lot) in shambles in addition to their layered familial circumstances.

The setting, an almost dystopian-feeling post-climate catastrophe world where it constantly rains and the water levels continuously rise to the point of destruction, adds to the chilling hauntedness of the story. The damp and dreary mood set by the environment perfectly pervades the rest of the story, highlighting each character’s dysfunction.

The book also touches on a variety of social issues that include love and loss, collective apathy, mental health and caregiving in the face of widespread trauma, cultish influence, and socioeconomic inequality. I love that water has played important roles in all of Armfield’s books, and I am excited to see if this continues in whatever she publishes next!

Thanks so much to Netgalley and Flatiron Books for the advanced copy!

This book has a lot of moments where it goes absolutely crazy on the literary level. I also have a whole bunch of problems with it, which is really disappointing, because I love Julia Armfield, I think she’s one of the only authors I’ve ever seen consistently pull off short stories, and Our Wives Under the Sea is incredible. Sophomore book slumps don’t discriminate, it seems. I’ll always think she’s an excellent writer, and the writing on the sentence level is not the problem. It’s literally everything else.

Private Rites opens with a 2-page prologue. The problem is, by the time I actually got through 200+ pages of introspection and family trauma, I had completely erased the prologue, which is a very different tone and suggests possibly supernatural elements that are not at all present in the rest of the book, from my mind. I’m sort of embarrassed to admit it, but when I went back and flipped through to see if I had been missing any hints for that lazy ending, I realized I had ended up thinking it was a prologue from a different book I was reading at the same time. I forgot it was even part of Private Rites. In my view, this book is deeply confused and disconnected from itself.

These bits simply don’t fit together—a half-assed rendition of King Lear (my favorite Shakespeare work) that really has no claim to being King Lear beyond the incredibly basic concept of three daughters and an inheritance from their father, a rain crisis creeping towards the premise of Waterworld, the rise of cults during the rain apocalypse, and three different underwritten relationships between each of the sisters (I couldn’t tell Irene and Isla apart or remember who was with Morven and who was with Jude until like 100 pages) and their partners that are deeply inconsequential and taking time away from what could be an absolutely breathtaking work about the sisters and their relationships with each other and their father. Especially the cult stuff.

I’m sorry, but to me, that ending just made no sense. The thread with the sisters incorrectly interpreting moments from their childhood is insanely cool—or, it would’ve been, if there were any actual hints as to what was going on and not just the aggressive and constant implications of these moments being the thing they weren't. The bits and pieces threaded through about the cult stuff are nowhere near prominent enough for any of this to work, and at no point did I take the hints as plot-relevant. I think I would have needed ~100 pages more for this to work with everything the author wanted to include.

There was so, so much good buried in here, and I’m just so disappointed with the execution, though I do believe it’ll work really well for a lot of people. I think for me, this hit close to home in a way that I needed more from: My half-brother is 20+ years older than me, and I could connect with Agnes’ struggles relating to her sisters, in particular the way that the older siblings have a total disconnect from Agnes’ experiences and see their father in a very different way than she does. My half-brother idolizes our father, while I have personally chosen to have a very limited relationship with him. This book was so, so real in so many ways, but I felt like it wouldn't let me in on the level it needed to, if any of that makes sense. The tone is too consistently detached.

I started this book literally the day my dad died, I love that for me. Because as you may have read from the synopsis, these sisters' dad has just died. Unlike my own dad, this guy sucked, which made it a lot easier to handle. Here's the thing: I enjoyed the sisters' stories. They were quiet, and dealt with a lot more than just the passing of their father. They dealt with the world around them, which was also quiet in its ending- climate change was wreaking havoc, but people still lived mostly in denial. Honestly so much of the story tracked. We'd definitely do that, right? But the women had to grapple with the messiness of the world, their own complicated romances and friendships, their relationships with each other, the loss of their dad and their broken relationships with him, and just their general life trajectories and where they wanted to go from here. It was pretty good stuff! And then... the end happened. It was so (for me, anyway) out of left field that I still haven't a clue what went down. I simply don't get it. I feel like other people did though, so if you are other people, help a girl out? If you don't get it, like me, the rest of the book is still worth reading, so at least there's that!

Bottom Line: Quiet and reflective, telling the stories of three sisters coping with personal and global loss.

“The great washout of the world and no sense that it might have been otherwise.”

Not sure I even have the words for this one, but I’m going to try. I feel so incredibly lucky to have received an advance copy of this book. Julia Armfield has such a talent for making her characters feel real and for pairing this raw humanity with her horror writing. This story of three sisters is set against the backdrop of a world that is slowly drowning, blanketed by an endless rain and the rise of water that threatens to swallow every person and place in town.

As with Our Wives Under the Sea, Armfield has a particular skill in writing about grief that doesn’t look and feel the way people think grief is supposed to feel. In the case of this book, it’s grieving the loss of someone who maybe only ever made your life worse. It’s finding space for grief, relationships, love, family, and the simplest of everyday tasks when the world is quite literally falling apart around you.

The horror elements are sprinkled in somewhat subtly at first, growing as the story progresses and we see the way these seemingly random occurrences string together to culminate at the end of this book. This leaves a simmering feeling of uneasiness in the reader that doesn’t reveal it’s true source until much further in.

I cannot speak highly enough about this book, and I encourage everyone to preorder it and give it a read when you can. It’s one that is going to be sticky in my mind.

It was a solid three stars book. It didn't really bring some special or new element, but it also didn't disappoint in any of the element it come up with.

I have seen Julia Armfield's name around but hadn't read anything by her, so I was very excited to receive an early copy of this one. I enjoyed this book -- I thought that her writing was lovely and descriptive and the slightly dystopian vibe of the book was really unsettling.

I love books about complicated family relationships and this one was great for that. I really liked learning about each of the sisters, and how the death of their father impacts their lives.

I will definitely be checking out Julia Armfield's backlist and look forward to reading more from her in the future!

Thank you to NetGalley for the advanced copy of this book!

This was a profoundly mixed but beautiful bag, but I think I'm still very obsessed with it?? The ending made up for the draggy, baggy middle, and the writing was consistently exquisite (as you'd expect from anything Armfield). I can't believe I've found a climate fiction novel that I 'like'?

I had read and was disappointed with Our Wives Under the Sea earlier this year, but I really wanted to like Armfield's sapphic litfic. I wish, however, that this book was not so slowly paced because I found myself growing incredibly bored until the very end. It was a drag—admittedly a well written one—and I feel that perhaps Armfield's litfic does not work for me as I had hoped.

Lesbian retelling of King Lear in a climate change dystopia should have been an instant sell for me but why do interesting books have to be so SLOW! I guess I was expecting something plot driven but this is an old-fashioned character study, focusing on a trio of queer sisters whose lives are unraveling in different ways in the aftermath of their father's death. I find that the novella format of "Our Wives Under The Sea" was able to highlight Armfield's elegant prose while building a sense of sticky, uncanny tension. The tension in this story is less supernatural: the oppressive atmosphere of the prose a clear metaphor for the rising waters and heating air. There is a sense of restless energy emendating both from the story and the characters, scenes of half-finished arguments interspersed with omniscient musings from the perspective of the city itself. Still, it's hard to buy into a novel in which both the characters and the author seem to lack motivation to make it to the end. If the big reveal had come sooner than the last 20 pages, and if it had been more successfully foreshadowed throughout the story, perhaps the previous ~250 pages would have felt less like a slog.

Three sisters attempt to navigate their complicated relationships to each other in a world that is beset by an endless deluge of rain, When their neglectful father dies, Isla. Agnes, and Irene come together to try and put to rest his affairs and re-establish communication between themselves while coping with grief, anger, and lingering resentments. All may not be as it seems, however, as hidden behind the riveting family drama sinister forces may be watching the family with malign interest, waiting for the opportune moment to set their own agenda into motion.

I felt that Private Rites came together a little slowly, but once everything clicked I found myself fully engrossed with the minute to minute details of the lives of the three sisters and their struggles coping with the very complicated relationship they had with their father and between themselves. The backdrop is astonishingly captivating, a world that is literally drowning, infrastructure falling apart, greed and con artists sapping funds for ill-advised solutions, and so much more is effortlessly brought into being via Julia Armfield's deft writing. Allowing the perspective to shift from sister to sister as the norm was a clever move, especially when the usual pattern is broken up by unexpected points of view like the sister's partners or even the top-down view of the unnamed city itself as it succumbs to the downpour. My only issue is that the ending seems to come about very abruptly, the menace that had been building didn't seem to resolve itself in a way that I found as satisfying as I had hoped, though all the great character work and worldbuilding allowed me to easily move past it.

A very good read, one I can heartily recommend.

A King Lear retelling set in a world where it's rained for so long that society's changing. Three sisters estranged falling back together.

I really liked the vision of this. I always like a Shakespeare retelling and the idea of a world shaped by the never ending rain intrigued me. But I was disappointed that the world and rain didn't play a larger role. I was so intrigued by that all and thought it was a really unique idea but I felt that it was actually quite minor.

The plot started to feel repetitive to me by the end. The end was underwhelming. I didn't feel super connected to the siblings, nor did I care about what happened to them.

Private Rites is to sisterhood what Our Wives Under the Sea is to grief and loss. There is definitely a watery horror underpinning this story - no one writes water horror quite like Armfield. The mental strain, the varied physicality of it, the neverending, almost monotonous dripping. But, at its core, this story is focused on 3 sisters and their twisted relationship. The prose is gorgeous, almost meandering in it's languid fluidity.

I think I would read anything Armfield writes. This is an easy 5 stars for me. Thank you to NetGalley and Flatiron for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

"The three of them, trying to be less isolated and frequently failing, trying to be less conclusively the product of their past."

The city is slowly sinking under the weight of the endless rain, like its the end of days. And it is for the carmichael family-three daughters who grew up with inconsistency and neglect under the care of their manipulative and cold father. Upon learning of his death, the complicated relationships Isla, Irene, and Agnes share have them feeling high strung and isolated. When the sisters finally reunite to discuss the future of their father's home, malevolent outside forces descend to bring it all (the world, the family, the house itself) crashing down.

Thanks, netgalley and flatiron, for giving me this ARC to review! There were twists in this book that i in no way anticipated. Armfield really invoked a sense of drowning in foreboding in this book thay sometimes made it difficult for me to read, maybe because it was too skillful and may have made me feeling so anxious about the future of the real world, where i don't have a floating house. Enviromental horror! The scariest kind!

I liked how the sisters had their own chapters and allowed you to feel their own fears and hopes, even in the end. The area where agnes discovers she in love hit me so deep in the gut- i know that feeling. And i feel like each sister made me feel both their deep grudges and desires for connection with each other. I have to say that the twist in the end made...a little confused. I didnt expect a happy ending, but i also didnt expect a hereditary movie where mom set up this ending from beyond! and i wanted a resolution for the sisters more than i wanted the explanation for why so many people were just staring unsettlingly at agnes. I enjoyed this read but it was NOT GREAT for my anxiety.

Julia Armfield is brilliant at writing living grief. Mourning something that has not quite come to pass.

Private Rites takes place in an apocalyptic world. Climate change has transformed earth into vast wetlands and sinking cities. Constant rain that seeps into your bones, a dampness eating away at the walls. As civilization becomes threatened by encroaching water, a sense of finality plagues everyday life. How people react to this nearing end is the main backdrop to our story. These manifestations of grief in our slow decline into obsolescence. And the old rituals and religions that burst forth as people clamber for control and peace of mind.

Amongst it all, our three sisters Isla, Irene, and Agnes are dealing with the death of their cruel and revered father. And the haunting glass house of their childhood he left behind. Each are frankly numb to the world ending outside, left floating in the vacuum left behind. Alongside grief, this book depicts a sense of yearning. Yearning for the way life used to be, yearning for who you could have been, yearning to fix what has been damaged. It’s feeling completely off kilter, like the floor is slanted just slightly to screw up your balance but still trick you into thinking everything is level. Our sisters yearn to fit together like they should, but their pieces were broken long ago. Haunted by the sneering judgment of a father that no longer holds power over them.

It’s strange how despite their dysfunctional dynamic, I still envied their sisterhood. I’ve always wanted a sister, and this book made that ache even more acute. As a fellow middle child, I felt the most connected to Irene. The infinite anger, prickly disposition, and contrarian nature of her teens being fossilized by her siblings and now forever how she is perceived. No matter how she grows as an adult. Her academic obsession with Christianity despite not being religious. Each of our sisters are at different stages in life, each highly informed by their birth order. Isla is currently facing divorce. She has a compulsive need for authority and organization. Irene is settled in a long-term relationship but straining at the seams. Agnes is solitary before she begins embarking on a new romance. As Irene states: “Sisterhood, she thinks, is a trap. You all get stuck in certain roles forever.”

But in addition to this tale about human connection and grief, there is a creeping horror to this story as well. The wayward stares and mutterings of strangers, the mysterious carvings in wood and errant notes, the unsettling memories bursting through dreams. Paired with offhanded accounts of people flocking to unsavory organizations, performing ancient rituals, you feel a pit in your stomach the whole book. A taut cord ready to snap. With how carefully placed these mentions are spaced out; you are lulled into a false sense of security. “This is the wrong genre,” Agnes thinks just as the other shoe drops. You are viciously reminded that this is a horror novel, and all those human elements were not so much a distraction, but a tone shift. Truly masterfully done. The sickness I felt was so jarring.

I fear that I may have lost some nuance because I am not familiar with King Lear. I now have this desperate pressing desire to pick it up because I want to be in the know. I want to reread this and investigate every nook and cranny, pick up on that extra layer filled with foreshadowing and references. It may just be in my future.

I read the prologue and said "what the heck did I just read". At the end of the book, I'm still kind of saying that BUT it is clear what Armfield is doing here is brilliant. I can't exactly name it, but this washed over me, entranced me, and I'll be thinking about it for a long time. While not for everyone, it is worth exploring.

What did I just read? Genuinely I have no idea.

It was a world ending book which is what drew me in. I adore that genre. And honestly I did love the slow burn world build dread.

However I thought it was leading up to some big finish and the finish... It was exactly as I predicted and also answered nothing.

I wanted to love this so much and though many times I got tempted to DNF because nothing was happening, I also had to know what happened. Honestly wish I hadn't.

Thank you Flatiron for my free ARC of Private Rites by Julia Armfield — available now!

» READ IF YOU «
👯‍♀️ have sisters, because you’ll get it
👀 live for that ‘unsettling’ vibe in a story
🐙 enjoyed Our Wives Under the Sea

» SYNOPSIS «
Sisters Isla, Irene, and Agnes could not be more different—at least in the most obvious ways. Deep down, they share more than they think, especially when it comes to the rocky relationship each had with their recently-deceased father. When his will is read, tempers flare, but the sisters will have to come back together to combat the strange, unsettling feeling that someone is watching them…

» REVIEW «
Our Wives was one of my favorite reads of the year, so of course I simply HAD to get my hands on a copy of Private Rites! I’m happy to say I enjoyed it and that the eerie vibes were very similar to those of Our Wives, though they didn’t really “kick in” until the last third of the book or so. Fortunately, I was engrossed in reading about the sisters and their lives so I wasn’t pining for the creep-factor—it just became an added bonus.

Definitely check this one out if you love dark, brooding literary fiction with a sprinkle of speculative “wtf”…

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Private Rites was one of my most anticipated releases of 2024 and it did not disappoint! After seeing several King Lear references, I brushed up on that storyline and found it beneficial to the overall reading experience. This is a stunning and atmospheric tale that will pull you in and pique your interest until the last page.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for a free e-ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This was a gorgeous book. More literary dystopian sci-fi/horror like this, please!
The dystopian/apocalyptic part of this book was masterfully done. The slow collapse of society and people still going to work amidst catastrophic flooding and weather events was chilling and honestly, a bit too real.
Loved how queer this book was, as well. The casual inclusion of a major nonbinary character, plus all the sisters being sapphic, was incredible.
King Lear is one of my least favorite Shakespeare plays, so the fact that I liked this retelling really shows how great an author Armfield is.
Armfield's prose is gorgeous and honestly unmatched. She is a master at water-based horror.

Julia Armfield writes so beautifully. However, I was never fully sure what was going on in this book. Definitely more plotless and just vibes. I enjoyed this book but it didn't capture me like her previous book did.

Thanks to NetGalley and Flatiron for a copy of this ARC.