This debut novel is a captivating blend of gothic atmosphere, epic fantasy, and romantic intrigue. Set against the backdrop of the salt-swept port of Vigil, it introduces us to Arden Beacon, a character tasked with a formidable job that involves using her blood's magic to fuel the lighthouse's flame. This premise sets the stage for a tale rich in magic and heritage, as Arden strives to live up to her family's esteemed legacy.

Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience

I received an advanced reader copy of this book to read in exchange for an honest review via netgalley and the publishers.

4 star review!

What a sensational gothic / romantic / fantasy read. Set in the seas with abundant monsters such as plesiosaurs and the infamous kraken! Found the characters in the storyline easy to connect with and loved the witty banter between Arden and Chalice.

I look forward to reading the other 2 books in the trilogy!

This is a gothic fantasy romance that some people will love. It features a lone lightkeeper and the new boy who moves to town, who people think is bad. A typical romantic plot line. It's quite slow paced and unfortunately it wasn't for me.

Arden Beacon is a 27 year old woman in possession of a special kind of magic within her blood that means she is tasked with being a lightkeeper on a lonely island, keeping its inhabitants safe from monsters in the deep. As soon as Arden arrives in her new town, she is told terrifying tales of her new neighbour Jonah Riven who apparently forced his wife into marriage, and then killed her - and her body was never found. But Arden soon discovers there is a lot more to the story and to her silent neighbour then meets the eye.

I think this book had so much potential to be a really great fantasy story. There has obviously been a lot of thought put into the magic, and how it works and what it means for everyone in the town from genetics to bloodlines to socio-economics and politics. There was also the ripples of a great love story between Arden and Jonah - two people with magic buzzing in their veins and enough chemistry to make it sizzle between them.

However the story was lost between the meandering pace of the plot (or indeed whatever plot there was as I never quite figured out where we were going with this). I got to 73% and I swear hardly anything had happened and the bits that did were melodramatic and didn't feel like they actually added anything of substance.

I originally started this on audiobook and it was fine, and the narrator was decent - but when I started to struggle to care about the story I switched to my ebook version thinking this might help reinvest myself into the story and it was honestly worse., I very rarely DNF books, I normally give them till the very last page to convince me it was a good read but I couldn't do it here. I was just so bored and couldn't muster any enthusiasm to finish this so I had to put it down.

Not for me. I didn't like the language and I felt like I was thrown into the middle of a story that was already part way through. A steam punk Jane Eyre had me intrigued but I didn't like it, sorry.

I got a free copy of this book from Netgalley, all thoughts and opinions are my own

I tried, I really really did try to read this book, but I just didn´t like it. It was so boring and confusing to me. The characters were all bland and not for me at all. It took me such a long time to pick it up, and when I finally did start reading this book I just didn´t want to be reading this at all.

Maybe I will try to read this book again in the future, but for now this book was sadly not for me.

For some reason I just really struggled to get into this book. I wasn't a huge fan of the authors writing style and couldn't find it in myself to like the characters. I ended up DNF'ing at around 25%.

Monstrous Heart by Claire McKenna (The Monstrous Heart Trilogy 1) is a fantasy, set in a world where some people's blood holds special powers. Arden Beacon's blood can be set fire to, and so she is a Lightmistress, a lighthouse keeper. 

Arden has just moved to a new lighthouse, in an area that is altogether more of a backwater than the city she is used to, but the people still try to manipulate each other.  She's told horrible stories about her closest neighbour, Jonah Riven, that he can summon kraken, that he murdered his family when young, that he murdered his wife recently.

This is a fantastic story, with a setting and background that I've not encountered before.  It's a gripping story, that I just wanted to keep reading.

The second book came out this year, and so I will be reading that at some point!

Monstrous Heart was published on 31st March 2020, and is available from Amazon, Waterstones and Bookshop.org.

You can follow Claire McKenna on Twitter, Instagram and her website.

I was given this book in exchange for an unbiased review, so my thanks to NetGalley and to HarperCollins UK.

This book unfortunately just didn't work for me. I loved the atmospheric writing style but everything else was quite confusing and made the book difficult to follow. The world-building needed to be explored further to really grip the reader.

I wasn’t a fan of this book at all. It was impossible to understand.
I ended up DNFing it at 45%
Not a book for me

Magic, a lighthouse, sea monsters, steampunk vibes and a romance straight out of the pages Bronte - what’s not to like. Monstrous Heart by Claire McKenna is a near perfect start to a new fantasy trilogy. Great storytelling, my only complaint was that I would have liked some more detailed world building. Monstrous Heart is definitely the start of something special.

Why did this book remind me of Jane Eyre?! It's beautifully gothic and delightfully well written, I found myself racing through it unable to put it down,

Interesting take on quite a classic tale. I hadn't remembered I'd read this until I refreshed myself with the description, but I now remember finding the characters quite intriguing and I wasn't always able to predict where the story would lead

“Not all the monsters have twelve arms and live in the sea.”

CW: Implied rape, rape fantasies, blood.

I’ll be honest, the book I read wasn’t the book I expected to read. The blurb implies a historical fantasy-romance set by the sea, between a wayward woman and a brooding man; the book read as a steampunk vague-romance between a woman with some inherited powers and a supposed rapist that she still fancies.
Plus, it turns out this book is the first in a series. Once again from the blurb, I just assumed it would be a one-off romance, so I was surprised to find the end of it setting up for a sequel.
I mean, the idea of the story interested me until I read the blurb and now I’m just confused.
The first 30...50% really dragged. Like I did not enjoy it. Not necessarily that it was bad, but we were just expected to understand everything, but also nothing happened. We get introduced to a lot of characters I didn’t really remember throughout the book and are faced with said innate abilities that weren’t spoken about in the blurb.
I never really came to understand them. There were some big revelations towards the end about them and they kind of went over my head because I just didn’t understand the implications of them. The repeated explanations towards the end did mean the final 15% was dull again, once the action had finished.
The middle part was definitely better. I found it much easier to read and more interesting when I picked it up.
I do wish that we’d learnt more of the history of the gifts, though. And the world generally and specifically. I wanted to learn about the “monsters”, rather than have the author rely on me already knowing what they were. And I wanted to learn what created this steampunk world (especially because I couldn’t come up with the world until I’d finished reading it) of cars and airships, but still limited female agency.
Jonah was the most interesting character only because he wasn’t what was expected of him. More than just us expecting some sexy, brooding, powerful man, he was actually very submissive (shown by women that literally stick their hands down his pants, which, remember, would be weird the other way round). It was also weird that Arden kept fantasising about him “forcing himself upon her”. I just... Yeah. He was an interesting character because he turned what usually are patriarchal tropes on their head, but I still wasn’t comfortable reading it.

Loved this story. Monstrous Heart is a fierce, passion-filled tale full of gothic atmosphere. A maritime tale about a woman fighting against the elements, both natural and unnatural, manmade and magical. When Arden Beacon arrives in the rugged port of Vigil her task is to use the magic in her blood to keep the lighthouse burning and guide vessels safely past the coastline. But Vigil is a dark and deeply prejudiced place surrounded by mysterious waters and ancient sea beasts and Arden must use her instincts and intelligence to make sense of the town, the man who is her neighbour - whispered to be a brutal and merciless hunter and killer, Arden finds Jonah Riven’s desolation to be an irresistible pull - and the dark, mysterious waters that surround them all.

This is a world carefully controlled by genetics, where special powers are passed on through the blood, and where every person with a blood gift is known and married appropriately. I found myself intrigued by this epic tale of fevered attraction in a world dominated by blood affinities and controlled with ruthless authoritarian oversight by the Eugenics Society which assigns human value based solely on what flows through a person’s veins. It is against this backdrop that Arden must make her way.

At first I thought, I've read this setting before but soon McKenna sweeps into a very entertaining novel full of mysteries and strong characters misunderstood by all. I rather liked Arden, set in her ways for sure, but also refusing to accept other people's hearsay unless she confirms it herself. McKenna spends no time world-building, keeping this a story tightly focused on what Arden knows (and cw:patriarchy is strong here) rather than an epic fantasy style.

Leviathans! Steampunk! Magic blood!

If you’re looking for a book that ticks those three boxes, look no further. This is the story of Arden Beacon, whose family is famous for conjuring light from their blood. She’s tasked with keeping an ancient lighthouse in the tiny town of Vigil alight, but soon finds out that there’s far more to Vigil than meets the eye.

This story feels a lot like a fairy tale in the way it’s constructed: there are mythical creatures, a forbidden (and steamy!) romance, a lot of Wuthering Heights-style brooding and a likeable heroine in Arden. Again, the world-building is pretty epic. You do feel like you’ve been plunged into a dark and twisted version of Victorian England, where abandoned coastlines and swashbuckling seafarers reign supreme and danger lurks around every corner.

Finding the balance for world building is always tough, I get that but for this one there was just a serious lack of it. This made it really hard to follow what was going on. There was also a lack of chemistry in the romance which didn’t make it any better.

Arden Beacon is part of a very old and noble bloodline. Her family holds a very special ability: the beacons can ignite and keep flames alive in the lighthouses by using their blood.And that's what he's tasked with in the small port town of Vigil .

But soon enough, Arden realizes that Vigil holds more secrets than she could possibly have guessed. Politics between the families have evolved into secret wars, and Arden will find it very hard to properly do the job she was tasked with. The everyday life at the lighthouse is harsh, too.

But the greatest danger of all, is that she's been warned more than once about her dangerous neighbor, Jonah Riven. The leviathan hunter is notorious for his brutality. And he's also known as the monster who brutally murdered his wife. Although living close to him, Arden has to stay out of his way. And that's exactly what she fails to do,

Monstrous Heart is a beautiful novel that blends historical fiction and fantasy so well together, that the result is equal parts a dark fairy tale and a great adventure. Arden is an intelligent and feisty character, which you'll both admire and get frustrated with, since she manages to make choices that are both admirable and extremely foolish. The whole world around her has been constructed carefully up to the tiniest details, and the story unfolds effortlessly.

Monstrous Heart is a book you won't be able to put down. This is a beautiful getaway to a strange world, and a story all lovers of magic things and strange tales will certainly appreciate.