This is the book post I’ve been trying to write for years. I’ve been coming back to this book almost every year around Halloween, and then some more, since I was 14 years old, and I lost count years ago how many times I’ve read it. You may have noticed by now that I like to review books in groups. I’ve been looking for an excuse to review Juliet Marillier’s Heart’s Blood for ages. But finding either a ghost story or a Beauty and the Beast retelling that can hold a candle to it has been a task and a half.
A few Christmases ago, my mom gifted me Roald Dahl’s Book of Ghost Stories. Turns out, Roald Dahl hadn’t written any of them. He had hand-selected them after slaking through hundreds of ghost stories looking for suitably chilling tales to adapt to the screen. In his preface, he wrote that there are very few truly good ghost stories. Admittedly, I didn’t read hundreds, but I have to agree. There is no ghost story like Heart’s Blood in my mind, despite my best efforts to find a comparable.
This is an historical fantasy retelling of Beauty and the Beast set in medieval Ireland to the backdrop of the Norman conquest. I know what you may be thinking. That trope has been done to death. I promise you, it hasn’t. Heart’s Blood features a spectral army rather than singing clocks and candelabras, a rare plant sought for its rich violet ink rather than an enchanted rose, a long-buried family secret and a slow-burn romance. Let’s get into it.
Heart’s Blood
Whistling Tor is shrouded in secrecy. Young Caitrin is fleeing an abusive kinsman when she seeks shelter in the settlement. The villagers speak of their chieftain with revulsion. Undeterred by their chilling tales, Caitrin seeks him out in his crumbling fortress.
“I did not for one moment believe in tiny beings that whispered in one’s ear… But I had learned about the human monster, and I needed a bolted door before I could sleep.”
Anluan—the beast—is no prince in a monster’s disguise. Rather, a childhood palsy left half his face and body paralyzed. He’s become a lonely, bitter young man prone to violent outbursts that no magic will cure.
“His appearance was unsettling, for although his features were above the commonplace in beauty, they were at the same time somehow skewed, as if the two sides of his face were not a perfect match for each other. I noted the red hair, as ill tended and overgrown as his garden, and the fair complexion, flushed by anger.”
After forming a terrible first impression, Anluan reluctantly offers Caitrin safe haven for the summer in exchange for her work. Retained to sort through the entangled family documents in the library, as she gets to the bottom of her task, she realizes she’s looking for a key to breaking a curse hanging over the wooded hill. The Tor is haunted by the spectres of its past inhabitants. Summoned by Anluan’s great-grandfather a hundred years earlier to serve him. Only, something went awry, and instead it’s the chieftain who is bound to the will of the eerie host.
“‘Oh God, oh God!’ someone screamed, as behind the rider a swirling mass flowed out from under the trees around the courtyard, not mist, not smoke, but something full of gaping mouths and clutching hands, something with a hundred shrieking, moaning voices and a hundred creeping, pattering feet.”
My Thoughts
Caitrin is hiding from her own demons. Both of these young people bear scars, and while Anluan is quick to snap at her when she begs him to be brave, she hasn’t let her past warp her sense of good. She has nothing but patience with Anluan, who has borne the haunting legacy of his ancestor alone since he was a boy. Anluan, in turn, shows Caitrin how brave she is even when she feels terrified. What I love about this book is that these two fragile creatures look past each other’s hurt to bring out the best in each other, and it doesn’t feel forced.
“‘You could practice being brave a little at a time…Choose a small fear, show yourself you can face it. Then a bigger one.‘”
I love a character-driven novel. Sure, I like suspense, but it amounts to nothing if the characters are as flat as the page they’re printed on and I think that’s where I find myself disappointed by so many plot-driven novels. Juliet Marillier excels in both aspects. Her characters are human in every sense of the word. She never rushes. Her stories unfold slowly, which make them all the more satisfying.