Dora is a barmaid.
Usually her life is fairly simple: she gets up, cleans the inn, feeds the chickens, argues with the increasingly obstreperous cockerel, listens to the woes of her fellow barmaid, avoids doing the laundry, and serves drinks to the motley crew of islanders who lurk about the taproom every night.
The same old routine, day in, day out.Tonight, though, is different.
Tonight, just one week before the vernal equinox, after a catastrophically bad harvest the year before, a stranger has walked into the bar…
Amelia lives in Yorkshire with her family.
At least she definitely had a family around here somewhere, but to be honest she’s spent so much of the last year staring into a word processor she thinks they may have wandered off.
Her writing is fuelled by mugs of terrible, over-sugared coffee, much better chocolate, and the occasional macaron, and is punctuated by her soulless whimpers and the sound of her head hitting the keyboard.
Occasionally she remembers to get up and do something else, if the cats bite her hard enough.
My thoughts: this was very funny, poor Dora, she just wants to find a way to rule the new vicar out of being sacrificed to the island’s god, and seducing the vicar or scaring him off seem like such good plans too.
But she hadn’t counted on Norman (the vicar) being completely immune to everything she tries and they’re running out of time.
Clever, funny and a bit silly too. Maybe human sacrifices are a bit passé but the island’s terrifying god needs appeasing somehow. Just not with roasted vicar.
Playing with tropes of horror and Gothic literature, as Dora attempts to save Norman from the flames and realises that perhaps, even though she’s read lots of books, she doesn’t know much at all.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in the blog tour but all opinions remain my own.
ramblingmads 