When Chloe arrives at her fiance’s hometown for her wedding she finds the village full of secrets and superstitions. Something is amiss in Mockbeggar Woods and on Blanch Farm.

Using the old Small Angels church for her wedding unleashes something long buried. Yet nobody from the village will talk about the Gonne family on Blanch Farm, the old stories, or what happened ten years ago.

Through snippets told by Lucia Gonne we gradually unravel the mystery of Mockbeggar Woods and the village’s haunted past. Will Chloe find out the truth before it is too late and will anybody help or believe her?

A creeping gothic tale of sisters, secrets and evil spirits.

Mockbeggar church hosts weddings and ghostly goings on

memories which haunt

events from the past come back to haunt

what is in the woods around the church

magical realism and folkloric in nature

A bit of fantasy too

very dark in places

I wasn't sure what to expect from the title and the blurb of the pre-release copy I was fortunate to receive.

The story revolves around a few women: Chloe has been planning her wedding for months - and now she has the perfect venue: Small Angels, a picturesque little church at the edge of Mockbeggar Woods, in the village her husband-to-be grew up in. So why are the villagers telling her such unsettling stories about the place? Why is she beginning to see, hear, and even smell things that couldn't possibly be real? Her fiance absents himself as the mystery grows and I wondered whether the unsettling events might drive them apart.

Chloe's sister-in-law to be, Kate, has stayed away from the village for years, haunted by a night in the woods she can never forget, no matter how much distance she puts between the past and her present. But it begins to catch up with her as the author skilfully unravels the secrets of Mockbeggar Woods.

I thought this was brilliantly written and a modern gothic tale to be read and re-read for its richness, attention to beautiful detail, memorable characters and well-constructed plot. It was definitely scarier than a lot of books I choose and I had to 'read on' for an extra few minutes at bedtime to be able to get to the point I could turn out the light!
I will go back and read Lauren Owen's previous novel 'The Quick' as I enjoyed this immensely. Many thanks to the publishers and Netgalley for my advanced copy.

In Small Angels by Lauren Owen, we follow Chloe and Sam who are getting married in a small village where Sam grew up. Their venue is an old church the locals call Small Angels, and from the very beginning we know there's *something* about that church... Creepy stories about weddings? Ghosts, secrets and mysteries? I was really excited!

It starts as a wonderfully spooky novel, a bit gothic, but it quickly turns into more of a folk horror - which I love. Chloe doesn't know much about the village, but she soon hears a ghost story at the local pub about the church and an old family, which of course many people - including Chloe's husband-t0-be - dismiss as a mere superstition. It genuinely gave me creeps and I was eager to get stuck in this story! Unfortunately, from about 2/3 of the novel, it gets very confused. I'm not sure whether the author couldn't decide which character was going to be the main protagonist as various subplots and characters got convoluted and wanted to be the star of the show. I do love a dual timeline, but that got messy as well.

The author had a brilliant idea, an excellent set-up, but then tried to cram too many things in one book. From ghost story to folk horror, Small Angels suddenly took a turn into dark fantasy and as a reader I didn't know what I was reading anymore. It all get wrapped up nicely at the end, though, and I would definitely be interested in reading more from Lauren Owen in the future.

Thank you to Netgalley and Tinder Press for this e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Disturbingly gothic! It was so good and creepy and beautiful! Though I wish the pace moved a bit faster I could not put it down

This was a gripping read, it was well written with a compelling storyline and well developed characters that each brought something to the plot. It was well paced with a good amount of tension and a dark, gothic atmosphere. I couldn't put this book down, it kept me guessing all the way through. A really enjoyable read.

This will be the caption on my Instagram post for “Small Angels” by Lauren Owen. The primary image for this post will be of the book itself, taken from the Headline or Tinder Press Instagram page. It will be published no sooner than 29/07/2022 unless suggested otherwise.

What if the woods remembered every story ever told to them, every hand that rested on bark in lament, every lovers name carved into the tree, every misdeed committed under a veil of leaves.

Mockbeggar church is the perfect place for a wedding, nestled in the English country-side, surrounded by forest. When Chloe discovers it, unused for nearly a decade, she knows she has found where she wants to get married. Kate, returning after ten years to attend her brother’s wedding, becomes haunted by memories that wind around her like smoke as soon as she steps into the village. The events from ten years before a haunting in themselves and rumour has it the one of the Gonne sisters has returned home, both Kate and Chloe will have to find their way through the telling of the trees to ensure no harm befalls them and those that they love. This book is an exquisite dark folk story. I loved it from start to finish. The vivid characters, the poetry of the writing style, lend themselves to the layering of a nuanced story that spans multiple generations.
It is a 5/5 for me, I found myself unable to put it down, it drew me into it completely. It is safe to say that I will be picking up a hard copy to read it again in the future.

My thanks to @netgalley @headlinebooks for the E-Arc, It was a pleasure.

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“Small Angels”
By Lauren Owen
Read it if:
-You are a fan of dark folk tales that are at times a haunting, I got goose-bumps reading this more than once.
-You know that all forests have their own personality type and feel like gateways to something so much more than ourselves.
-You know what it is to love and the way that we love people can bind us to people for years, even when they are gone.
- You, like me, enjoy the weird sh*t that is speculative fiction/magical realism.

This novel packs a spooky punch. It's like an old school horror style book, it's fresh and gripping and I enjoyed reading it. I look forward to seeing the cover and hope it's something gothic looking and spooky

In ‘Small Angels’, Lauren Owen demonstrates an irresistibly direct style. Her words find poetry in clipped, often blunt, sentences, that drive the reader right to the point. In this way, she quickly establishes situation and atmosphere and lends a really gratifying earnestness to her prose:

‘This was a pleasant place, but outside it would soon be growing dark. Her happiness felt like a very small island. Through the open door she saw that the sky had changed. A chill was creeping in like a touch of cruelty.’

Owen also has a great way of stacking up information in the same, direct way, which is unfussy and easy to digest. For example, from the preface, 'Mockbeggar':

‘[it] was widely agreed that the trees in the wood remembered; they could whisper to one another of things past and days long gone. They were hungry for human dramas, and they loved to hear stories from the village below.
If you whispered your tale by moonlight (the trees listened best by moonlight) you might hear Mockbeggar whisper back. The story would rustle from leaf to leaf, branch to branch, all the way to the shadowed, thorny heart of the woods where no human had ever existed.When the trees listened, a story lived – it became vivid, it took possession. You’d be there at its centre, watching it all unfold. It was worth braving the dark and the cold for this subtle magic.'

It’s not easy to give a plot summation of ‘Small Angels’; the narrative centres around the titular church, as well as Blanch Farm and Mockbeggar woods, where the Gonne family are the latest in a genealogy of village outcasts obligated to perform certain rites to keep the feeble villagers safe from an ominous threat linked to the death of Harry Child two centuries ago.

There are many voices in ‘Small Angels’, each one not only convincing, but compelling. Lucia (one of the four sisters of the family cursed to live always at the edge of the Mockbeggar woods, and to bear the burden of wardenship of it) and Selina (her grandmother) have particularly engrossing narratives, not unlike – say, the split narrative in Sara Collins’s ‘The Confessions of Frannie Langdon’ or ‘The Corset’ by Laura Purcell. Their chapters have something lush about them, as if you’re at a literature festival and are listening to an oral storytelling session. The chapters from Kate’s perspective and Chloe’s perspective (respectively, the sisters’ childhood friend and the young woman – Kate's future sister-in-law – who is marrying into the village community), are more contemporary. These two women’s stories are told in a bold and nervy style, more like Sarah Winman or Polly Clark. Elphine’s chapters (the ephemeral character, Lucia’s not-quite-there sister) are pure, intoxicating fairytale. Each point-of-view is perfectly placed (and paced) in the author's deliberate trickling of information.

Character-creation is one of the triumphs of the novel, with a harmony and cohesion of tone Owen achieves with her cast of disparate personalities. Owen maintains a clip and pace that is brisk and lively, despite the fact that the reader is tugged from one timeframe into another, and chapter-by-chapter, the plot we are following is disrupted as we’re pulled between viewpoints, which could whisk us back ten years or two hundred years, or transport us to another location, another drama. The intrusion of Chloe’s internalised 'story voice' is a particularly effective technique when it comes to fragmenting the reader’s sense of continuity, tapping into that horror-genre mood of apprehension:

’The breeze tugged at the flowers and the dog roses shed petals over her head.
{She reached out to one of those sweet pink and white flowers, but just before she was about to pick it she had a feeling that she shouldn’t, that it would be a huge mistake}
The small storytelling voice had crept back into her mind – she had been too distracted by the woods to guard against it.'

Many familiar symbols and archetypes are made use of here, but motifs are handled delicately, with a light touch not unlike Emily Tesh’s Greenhollow duology. Roses and briars, choking on earth, hounds of death, a church as sanctuary, a bride in bridal dress, the bond between sisters, a black sheep in the family, the grandmother/crone figure, and a vengeful spirit that can’t be laid to rest: all these well used tropes are made to read as startlingly new.

Where Owen exceeds Emily Tesh’s achievement, is in the LGBT representation in ‘Small Angels’, which is rarefied and pitch-perfect. It’s impossible to overestimate the significance of the positive portrayal of lesbian relationships. Chloe and Sam’s wedding might supply the critical plot drive, but the heart of the novel is Kate and Lucia's story.

Particularly memorable points in this remarkable novel are Chloe’s visits to the woods, as well as her pre-wedding ‘garland night’ at the Tithe Barn next to Small Angels church, in the chapter ‘Mockbeggar Bacchus’, which calls to mind the Dionysian ritual the students perform in Donna Tartt’s 'The Secret History':

’The night was warm as summer. Moonlight was coming in through the open barn door, and the dancers’ shadows made strange shapes in the light – like tree branches, Chloe thought, if you looked out of the corner of your eye. She found herself dancing, though she couldn’t remember when she had joined the others. […] The bride’s wreath was tight against her hair, flower stems scratching, but she would not take it off.'

In terms of comparisons, this novel’s narration recalls Donna Tartt's 'The Little Friend', where all we witness is coloured through the psyche of a young female protagonist. I’d also recommend this to fans of Jeanette Winterson’s style (especially ‘The Daylight Gate’). ‘Small Angels’ gave me the same reading pleasure as Sarah Waters’s ‘The Little Stranger’ or 'The Paying Guests', particularly the tantalising section after Frances and Lilian have murdered Leonard and are awaiting the consequences. Surprisingly, I found myself also recalling the mood of Daphne du Maurier’s ‘Rebecca’: there's something reminiscent of the scene during the inquest, where the second Mrs de Winter (and the reader) is full of the knowledge of what Maxim has done, and is humming with fright and dashing through consequences and alternative courses of action in her mind, to save him, before she faints.

In conclusion, Lauren Owen’s ‘Small Angels’ is a wonder of a novel. I don’t hesitate to rate it five stars, and it goes straight to my favourites shelf. I know it will be a sensation upon publication, when I will likely seek out a copy to read it again. My thanks are due to Headline for an advanced copy of the book via Netgalley.

'A story wears a groove if it’s told often enough. It wears you away like pacing feet on stone.'

Thank you, NetGalley, for letting me read this book.

I absolutely loved this book. What would you call it? Folk horror, I guess. Or not quite horror - though there is some gruesome stuff and a fine evocation of dread. Dark folk fantasy?

The book centres on three women, Chloe, Kate and Lucia; and on Mockbeggar Wood. Kate and Lucia grew up on the edge of the wood, but Chloe is an outsider, here to get married to Kate's brother Sam in the church of Small Angels, right on the edge of the woods. What Chloe doesn't know is that there's a reason Small Angels has been abandoned, and that Mockbeggar harbours something dark.

As a child, Lucia and her three sisters knew Mockbeggar well - the danger, but also the beauty. They took Kate there - and out of that, something terrible happened.

I don't want to say any more. You need to read it for yourself. However, Lauren Owen is great at invoking the beauty of the English countryside, and the insularity of English village life. Some disturbing things happen - it's genuinely creepy in places - but there's real beauty here as well. I would thoroughly recommend this book.

This book and I had a toxic relationship; I absolutely hated the fact that I enjoyed it so thoroughly. This book is titled ‘Small Angels’ but bloody hell it’s about quite the opposite. It gave me nightmares on the second night.

Initially it felt a bit like a campfire story with a hint of Blair-witch project vibes. Puts you into a bit of a trance, like you’re sedated by the story.

The relationship between Lucia and Kate was so tender and ardent. I could feel their longing for each other through the pages, and it regurgitated so much of my own, that I could physically feel it. And the relationship with the Gonne family made me wish I had sisters of my own.

It was written quite cleverly with the multiple POVs and how they gradually began to align the past with the present making it uncomfortably bewitching. When I wasn’t reading it, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, even though it scared me to do so. You see? Toxic, but in weirdly good way.

It’s been a long time since a book has bewitched and enthralled me so much. It’s dark and magical and evocative and uncanny, and I loved every page. An incredible book by an incredible writing talent.

I can’t wait to see the cover of this book when it’s released, I hope that it’s suitable spooky, because the novel packs a punch!

Without giving too much away, a malevolent spirit causes anguish to the residents of a small rural town. A wedding is planned, but the past catches up with those who remember..

Dark, spooky and with an old school gothic vibe, read this curled up safely indoors under a blanket, and preferably with dog hugs to calm your nerves!

This book was primarily a paranormal, fantastical story that I wasn't expecting it to be. Some interesting characters, especially the Gonne sisters. At times I did struggle to understand the "why" of a lot of the story I would have preferred for the book to move at a better pace. The writing was bogged down in unnecessary detail and leaned towards repetition so I found it hard to stay focussed and had to push myself to finish it. Not sure who the target audience is for this one, it felt like a YA story but too long and wordy for that market. Overall I felt it was 2.5 stars. Thanks to NetGalley and the Publisher for the advance copy of this book.