Review: 'The Island House' by Amanda Brittany
Pub. Date: 11/08/2021
Publisher: HQ Digital
A DARK FAMILY SECRET
When Alice’s father dies after a tragic hit and run, his death stirs up unanswered questions about her childhood. Who was her mother, why did her father never speak of the past, and why can’t she remember anything before the age of seven?
AN ISLAND CUT OFF
But when she receives an anonymous letter containing a photograph of a refurbished gothic guesthouse surrounded by water, and an invitation to stay, old memories fight to resurface.
Alice has visited before. She is certain of it.
WHO WILL SURVIVE?
Convinced the clues to her past lie at the hotel, she checks in. But once on the island, a wild storm rages, waves crash violently into the rocks, and the house is cut off by the roaring sea.
Then two guests are found dead. And the hotel owner is missing. Will Alice ever uncover her secret past?
And will anyone leave the island alive?
People are calling this a locked-room mystery on Goodreads and I don't know why. Is And Then There Were None a locked-room mystery, just because a group of people are stuck in an isolated place? Just because a room is locked does not mean a locked-room mystery has taken place, in my opinion. Almost by definition, it has to appear to be physically impossible for any of the characters to have committed the crime and The Island House is not detailed enough for that. The Honjin Murders by Seishi Yokomizo is a good example of an actual locked-room mystery and it requires an insane amount of detail and authorial control. The Island House has aspects of this, in the sense that there is clearly a grand plan that brough everyone to the house for the mayhem, but even the speed with which the characters jump to "there is a murderer among us" is insane. There is literally a crucial character who, from the beginning, is not present, so why wouldn't he be your first suspect, rather than the person standign right next to you? I know why, because plot vibes, but that doth not a locked-room mystery make. Terminology quibbles aside, The Island House is helped very much by the gothic flair it borrows for its setting and world-building in allowing for a certain level of disbelief suspension. However, it doesn't go quite far enough in doing so that I could deal with some of the utterly inane decisions being made throughout this book.
We start The Island House with Alice as she is informed of her father's death due to a hit and run. He was a very successful author so when his death reveals his real identity to the world, there is a lot of interest. Alice responds by mostly staying inside and hiring a young woman called Faith to take care of her sculpture store while she mourns. After a few months, Alice is slowly opening up to the world again when she receives a photo of a house on an island which reminds her eerily of the gothic mansion that has been haunting her dreams since she was a child. She made a sculpture of this house in her dreams, in fact, and it matches the Flynn House perfectly. When the new owner of the house, who has turned it into a boutique hotel, buys the piece and invites her to visit, she hems and haws. When Faith drags her awful new boyfriend Mitch there, Alice can't help her curiosity and convinces her ex-boyfriend Leon to come with her. Upon arriving at Flynn House it quickly becomes clear that not all is as it seems, including the other guests. Across one stormy night, all kinds of mad things occur which may or may not teach Alice something about herself. I really wanted to like Alice as a main character, especially because there are so many interesting aspects to her and her history, but she spends a lot of time in this book not really making any choices. She is sort of thrown around by the waves of fate but is consistently surprised and shocked by it too. I would have liked to root for her more. What doesn't help is that the book switches POV a lot, or rather focus, which doesn't really help. We don't really need Leon's insight, for example. There are also flashbacks or chapters which might be diary entries and while these start of interesting, they become something of a B-plot that waters down the tension of what is really happening. I did also have to say that within the resolution of it all, which was very dramatic and over-the-top, there were a few elements about family and love that I personally found a little icky in their implications.
The Island House has so many elements that I love. I adore a gothic house full of trauma and history. I adore a And Then There Were None-style mystery where a set of characters find themselves in a location that somehow means something to all of them. I also love a main character who can't quite remember her past but has ominous glimpses of it. And yet it didn't come together for me. Like, if we're going to have creepy ventriloquist dummies, give me more creeps. If we're going to have haunted family dynamics, really show them to me rather than just telling me about them. I do have to admit there is a fun twist to this which, while not super shocking, did give me a nice "oooohhhhh wait" moment early on when I caught one of the little bread crumbs. This wasn't quite enough, however, to save it from the otherwise rushed plotting. This is not a short book, but it reads super fast, jumping from one thing to another, back in time, forward in time, a new POV, another flashback, MURDER, brief contemplation, and then more running. The beginning is quite slow in setting up Alice and her current state of mind, but the last half or third is a lot. Perhaps if there was a better balance to the two, I would have gotten into the actual story a little more. So this one was technically a miss for me in many ways but I did want to know how it would all resolve, so it's not a complete loss. I would probably read something different by Amanda Brittany in the future, because I do think the skills are there. This story was just a bit too much.
I give this novel...
2 Universes!
I read The Island House very quickly, in an evening, and did have a form of fun with it, but in the end it felt a little messy to me. There are so many intriguing ideas, especially the way Brittany plays with the Gothic, but the book never lingers long enough to really come together.
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