The Reeve stands on the edge of the Dorset cliffs, awaiting its next inhabitants. Despite Orla’s misgivings, her husband insists this house will be the perfect place to raise their two children.
In 1976, Lydia moves to Dorset as a nanny for a family grieving their patriarch. She soon starts to hear and feel things that cannot be real, but her bereaved employer does not listen when Lydia tells her something is wrong.
Separated by forty years, both Lydia and Orla realise that the longer they stay at the Reeve, the more deadly certain their need to keep the children safe from whatever lurks inside it…
Nothing is quite what it seems at the Reeve, and with its pervasive atmosphere of claustrophobia and dread, Kate Collins’ gothic creation will chill you to the core.
Dark bleatings, my lovely tribe! I’m here to review a debut novel today and I have to ask – what’s with all these brilliant debuts over the last few years? I swear, every time I read a debut, I’m shocked that it’s the author’s first book because of the quality of the story.
In the present, Orla moves with her husband, young son, and baby to a home that she didn’t choose, that her husband just made the decision about without her input. It’s large, beautiful, ideal. Except for the voices…
Decades in the past, in the same house, Lydia works as a nanny for a widow, taking care of neglected twin girls, a neglected boy, and a baby – whom the mother does care about quite a bit. All seems reasonably well, until it isn’t.
If there’s one thing I love, it’s alternating perspectives, particularly when we jump between just two characters like this. The predicaments of these women are different but equally compelling, and I was always wondering if or how they might end up intertwining. The connection becomes clear at the end, but for quite a lot of the book, I was kept guessing about what the story actually was. Not in a “what IS this, though?” kind of way, more like a, “Ooh, what will it turn out to be?” kind of way. Is it ghosts? Poltergeists? Is it time travel. Will Lydia look in the mirror and see Orla staring back at her? There were many directions the author could have gone in with what she was setting up, and in the end, I was happy with the point that she landed on.
I’m finding it really hard to talk about the other reasons I loved this story, because the specifics are spoilers, so I’m going to have to wrap this review up already. This is frustrating for me because I could talk about this book all day!
I wholeheartedly recommend this to readers who enjoy spooky horror, female stories, and a little sadness to go with their scares. I will say that though it has its moments of fright, it is quite light on the horror front, in the traditional sense. This is much more psychological.
If you’d like to check out the book or the author, I’ve popped some links below for you:
Bleeeeat!
Happy Goat Horror 
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