The Story Collector - Evie Woods - ★★

AUTHOR: Evie Woods

GENRE: Historical Fantasy.

PUBLICATION DATE: July 18, 2024

RATING: 2 stars.

In a Nutshell: A dual-timeline novel containing history, mystery, and magic. The premise of this was perfect for my taste, but the writing approach and the character development didn’t work for me. This is an outlier review.

Plot Preview:

2010. New Yorker Sarah, in a hasty drunken decision after the end of her marriage, cancels her flight to her sister’s place in Boston and lands in Ireland instead. Once sober, she, though horrified, decides to make the best of her time in Ireland and ponder over her next step. But when she discovers a century-old diary, she discovers some unexpected secrets.

A hundred years ago, eighteen-year-old farm girl Anna is thrilled when Harold, a visiting American academician, asks her to be his assistant in speaking with the locals as he is collecting Irish fairy stories for his research project. But as the two of them learn more stories, they discover that real life is much darker and dangerous.

The story comes to us over the two timelines, in the third-person perspective of Sarah for the contemporary timeline and through Anna’s first-person narration in her diary.

Bookish Yays:

😍 The little Irish village and the quaint Irish charm and the magical Irish folklore with the non-Tinkerbell-like fairies. I loved everything connected to the place and the Celtic/Irish lore.

😍 A few of the secondary characters, especially Hazel, were interesting.

😍 The cover art is stunning!

Bookish Mixed Bags:

😐 The prologue is excellent, offering an interesting titbit about Thornwood House. As I love the presence of Gothic houses in historical fiction, I geared up for a fun journey ahead. Imagine my disappointment when I found that the house barely has an active role, and even when it does come up, the focus is more on its two denizens than on creating an atmosphere.

😐 Anna is a confused teen in terms of her romantic feelings. The switcheroo between romantic interest 1 and romantic interest 2 happens almost abruptly and multiple times. Of course, at eighteen, she is expected to be somewhat impulsive, so I can probably ignore this. But I cannot overlook her inaccurate character development. Her knowledge is much more than what a poor Irish farm girl of the early 1900s would have. She’s never heard or seen any American but she knows that Harold has a strong American accent the moment he speaks. Lines such as "It tickled me when he did such American things" are odd when she doesn’t know any other American to know what “American things” are. Another example is how she has no idea what wine is but she recognises champagne immediately. There are too many inconsistencies in her character detailing.

😐 The book is titled ‘The Story Collector’, which, strictly speaking, is Harold. However, he is more of a second lead in the historical timeline and is only referred to briefly in the contemporary timeline. Anna’s role is more prominent in both timelines thanks to her diary being the connector. I guess that Anna, as the story collector’s assistant and translator, could also be called a ‘story collector’, but it would be a stretch.

😐 The plot in both timelines is mostly typical except for the investigation of fairy stories, which is anyway in the background. The main content is more about romance, “feelings”, grief and loss in both timelines, basically more of women’s fiction except for the fantastical parts. The fairy stories are excellent, so I wish there had been a lot more of these.

😐 The link between two timelines is Anna’s diary, which reveals the past fairy mysteries and Harold’s story collection endeavours to the contemporary characters. But other than the fact that Sarah is reading Anna’s diary, there is barely any firm connection between 1910 and 2011. Characters who make an appearance in both timelines are obviously minimal thanks to the time lag, and those who do, do so without any explanation provided. As always, the past timeline is better, but only because of the fairy lore.

😐 I liked the ending for one timeline but not for the other. Can’t tell you which one and why – spoilers.

Bookish Nays:

🙄 This is a huge pet peeve of mine, so maybe it won’t bother other readers. But I absolutely hate it when a “diary” is written more like a talented author's magnum opus than like a personal journal. Anna's “diary” is a novel by itself, replete with back-and-forth conversations and needless descriptions. Imagine reading this in a diary: “‘Good morning, Miss!’ he called out […] ‘Good morning,’ I replied.” What diary is written this way? Anna also lists down all the general practices and beliefs of her village, as if she meant to publish her diary for outsiders to read and hence felt the need to include explanations. She even introduces characters as "Tadhg Fox, Tess's father", Were it an actual diary meant only for her eyes, she obviously wouldn’t need to provide details on who Tadhg Fox was. The worst of it was seeing the miscommunication trope come multiple times even in a diary, when one character is about to say something and is immediately interrupted by something else and what he wanted to say is forgotten. All this was very distracting to me, and as half the book comes from Anna’s “diary”, I simply couldn’t enjoy the experience.

🙄 Alcoholic protagonist who denies that she has an alcohol problem – another pet peeve.

🙄 Sarah’s story in the contemporary timeline should have felt more poignant, but ends up as a hodgepodge mess. She is an alcoholic in denial, but she is also grieving over a past tragedy. She is upset about her broken marriage but she doesn’t hesitate to jump into a new relationship. She has a family but they make barely any appearance in the entire story, not even through phone calls. It was a strangely isolated kind of narration, where I felt like Sarah was used mainly so that Anna’s diary could be found. Other than that, Sarah’s story and her timeline has nothing original. The novel would have worked perfectly even without Sarah’s track.

🙄 As always, the road to a woman’s happiness is through a new romantic relationship, even when the chemistry is barely there. Why can’t happiness for a modern woman come from moving on and taking charge of her life than from having a new man in her life?

🙄 There is unwarranted animal cruelty in the book. I’d have put this only under content warnings had the content been necessary, but that scene was just not required by the core plot. The graphic content could have easily been dialled down, or even removed.

🙄 There is an infodump of an epilogue, with a hurried tie-up of the contemporary timeline and a hasty explanation of what happens in the historical timeline.

I have read this author’s 2023 novel, ‘The Lost Bookshop’, and liked it much better than this one. I remember writing in my review for that book that it will “ work better if you read it with your heart than with your head.” I tried to follow the same advice this time around, but my heart and my head both refused to cooperate, mainly because of the non-diary-like diary, the needless romantic arcs, and the mostly typical storyline.

I had assumed this book to be the author’s latest, but it turns out, this book was originally published in 2018. Perhaps the success of ‘The Lost Bookshop’ led to a revival of this earlier novel. I am not sure if this is an updated version, but even if there were revisions, they obviously didn’t work for me.

Mine is very much an outlier review, so it is quite possible that you would enjoy this book more. Please read through the other positive reviews and take a more informed decision.

If I have to recommend this, I’d suggest it to clean romance readers and women’s fiction readers who don’t mind a dash of fantasy.

2 stars, mainly for the fairy lore.

My thanks to Harper 360 for providing the DRC of “The Story Collector” via NetGalley. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book. Sorry this didn’t work out better.

Content Warnings: Violent animal cruelty, (attempted) rape, miscarriage/stillbirth, death, grief, alcohol addiction.