The Forgotten House on the Moor - Jane Lovering - ★★

AUTHOR: Jane Lovering

GENRE: No idea!

RATING: 2 stars.

In a Nutshell: A novel with a confused self-identity, focussing on a character with a poor self-identity. Has some good moments but far and few between. Needs a lot of fine-tuning in terms of plot as well as character development.

Story Synopsis:

When the police knock on Alice’s door at 4am, she is stunned to hear that her husband Grant has been killed in an explosion in Fortune House – an old, supposedly haunted house on the moor. The surprise isn’t just because of his sudden death. What creates the befuddlement is that Grant was not into exploratory hikes at all, Alice has never heard of Fortune House or Grant’s connection to it, and most of all, Alice and Grant have been estranged since six years and she hasn’t heard from him since he left her.

Alice decides to dig into the matter, and soon finds herself working with Grant’s current girlfriend Jenna and her brother Max, with the common goal of discovering why Grant was in that lonely house all alone in the middle of the night.

The story comes to us in the first person perspective of Alice.

Bookish Yays:

✔ There are some letters in the book, supposedly written by the public to share their ‘haunting’ experiences at or near Fortune House. These were creepily entertaining. 

✔ Jenna rides a motorcycle! I loved seeing a female character have the motorbike as her vehicle of choice. 

✔ The pretty cover, though it doesn’t suit the book.

Bookish Nays:

❌ The cover and title are quite misleading. The house has a relatively minor role to play in the plot, about half of which focusses on the characters and their interpersonal relationships. Also, it is not exactly ‘forgotten’, considering the number of people who keep visiting its grounds.

❌ I have no idea what genre this book is attempting to be. Officially, it is women’s fiction, but it includes elements from Gothic, horror, cosy murder mystery, romance, and drama. It even adds in some humour. The result is a hodgepodge that dissatisfies. The worst is the attempt at humour, which simply doesn’t fit into such a serious story.

❌ I was intrigued by the promise of ghost hunts and hauntings, but the promise stays a promise rather than becoming part of the premise.

❌ It was very tough for me to like any of the characters, but the worst was the narrator, Alice. She seems unduly obsessed with looks, both of hers and of others. After every few paras, we get a soliloquy on her being unattractive/overweight—she is just a UK size 16, for crying out loud!—and on how gorgeous Max is and how it is impossible that he will choose her. Max has only three main things to do: talk about himself, talk about his work, and tell Alice how great she is. Jenna’s character had potential, but she is left unidimensional, being portrayed as focussed on (or rather, obsessed with) Grant. Don’t make me open my mouth about Grant. I will run beyond the character limit here. 

❌ There are plenty of inner monologues coming from Alice’s narration, most of which add nothing to the plot and are even quite repetitive. If all the fluff and inner monologues were cut out, the story could have been completed in about a hundred pages or so.

❌ If you ask people to think of a book that has a clever yet aggravating ending, many might suggest Colleen Hoover’s Verity as the top contender. I present to you this book as an alternative. The ending had an unexpected, last-minute, smart twist, but it creates so many questions and nullifies so many things established earlier in the plot that my rating slid by an entire half-point. 

📌 GIGANTIC SPOILER COMING UP. READ ONLY IF YOU DON’T WANT TO READ THE BOOK OR IF YOU’VE ALREADY READ IT. BUT I HAD TO RANT ABOUT THIS! 

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❌ It was ridiculous to see Grant only pretending to be dead in order to escape marriage with Jenna. But even more infuriating was to see how Alice and even Max (Jenna’s own brother!!!) had no qualms about letting the idiot back in Jenna’s life with that flimsy excuse of amnesia, and allowing her to continue with their relationship, and even proceed towards marriage. What kind of a brother lets his sister marry a selfish, lying, unreliable coward without even informing her about what her fiance did to escape their relationship?

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~~~~~~~~~END OF SPOILER~~~~~~~~~

All in all, this might work if you are looking for a light read that you want to go through without taxing your brains. But if you are hoping for the book to make sense, I think you might end up in the same boat as I did, sailing dejectedly to Outlier Island yet again. Then again, do check out the many other positive reviews before you make up your mind.

My thanks to Boldwood Books and NetGalley for the DRC of “The Forgotten House on the Moor”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.