This may be a “it’s not you it’s me” kind of situation as I’ve been quite slumpy lately but I just couldn’t get into this. I found myself putting off picking it up and opting to read faster paced reads.

Disappointing as this sounded right up my street!

🌒 The Naked Light by Bridget Collins is a gorgeously eerie gothic tale set in a post–World War I village haunted by superstition and sorrow.

This is a book that doesn't fit neatly into any particular genre. It is part historical, with it's setting being the years after the First World War. It is partly LGBTQ+ and about forbidden love. It is partly horror. It is partly about grief and wondering about what could have been. Just because it is difficult to categorise, it didn't feel scattered or unfocused. It is instead a beautiful book full of sadness and longing but hope too.

The village of Haltington seems like any normal village. And it's people have suffered as much as any during the war. Mrs Bone lost all of her sons and now she is concerned that after her, no one will be able to look after the face in the hill as her family has done for generations. Local legend has it that the face etched into the chalk wards away shadowy creatures.

Elsewhere in the village, Florence is grieving the loss of her mother and sister and lives off the charity of her brother in law, the local vicar. Her niece, Phoebe is also a curious young girl who Florence struggles to understand. When the enigmatic artist Kit moves into old Mrs Bone's cottage seeking a refuge and peace, she doesn't expect to find a connection with Florence. But with Mrs Bone gone, the creatures are looming and could spell disaster for the village.

While I personally am not as interested in the horror side of this story, I still enjoyed it and really connected with the characters and the other aspects of the plot.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read this book.

I was thrilled to be offered this arc as the author is much admired and her previous works are held in high regard. I thought a real treat to come.

A third of the way into the book I was still waiting for the action to start.

Beautifully written, with a keen eye for detail, but very slow, though a couple of shock tactics thrown in that added little to the story.

From the blurb, what I thought was going to be a ‘terrifying folk horror’ or a ‘haunting gothic tale’ took so long to get to anything remotely horror or haunting that I almost gave up. The book actually turned out to be a stereotypical love story between two women in a rural village (hence the bound by a secret blurb), a difficult, wilful teenager, with local folklore thrown in.

Not a book I could get my teeth into, and though well written, it was just not for me with an ending that seemed a little too convenient, perhaps something a little grittier and more unexpected was needed.

2.5*

Thank you NetGalley and Harper Collins UK.

This was a delightful blend of historical and speculative fiction. Thank you to NetGalley and HarperFiction for sending me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Set just after The Great War, we follow three main characters living in a small village in Sussex, watched over by the haunting Face, superstitiously carved into the ground centuries ago.

Florence lives with her widowed brother-in-law and her difficult niece, Phoebe. Neither of them are enjoying their lives when Kit moves into the village, who stirs local gossip with her androgynous appearance and unconventional lifestyle.

Surprisingly, Florence and Kit are drawn together, but the Face is always calling them in the background.

The book is almost marketed as a fantasy, with a lot of attention made of the Face and its gothic and atmospheric connotations. While it is a common theme throughout, it doesn’t play a key part in the story until the last 20% or so.

Instead, the story was much more focused on the relationship between Florence and Kit, which I really enjoyed. It took me a while to settle into Florence’s character, but Kit and Phoebe were interesting right from the start.

The context of women’s lives after the Great War was also fascinating to hear about, particularly the job that Kit did, in designing masks for men with war injuries.

The ending felt a little rushed for me, as I would have liked more detail and explanation on where the characters ended up, and how.

What happens when an ancient force collides with (what was then) the most modern of unimaginable horrors, the first world war? Collins writes with pin-sharp psychological precision about a world of mists and veils. Comparison with another of my favourite authors, Sarah Waters, feels almost lazy but unavoidable – - not just the sweeping, celebratory but challenging lesbian love story but also the unearthliness here reminded me in places of the ‘haunting’ in The Little Stranger. If I could give it ten stars I would.

4.5 stars

I went into this one nervous — I loved The Binding & The Betrayals, but The Silence Factory didn’t quite hit for me. Turns out I didn’t need to worry 👀 This is a stunning mix of historical fiction, folklore, supernatural fantasy & sapphic romance, and it had me hooked from page one.

🖌 Kit, a painter, moves into an old witch’s cottage
🙏 Florence, trapped in small-town life & living with her brother-in-law, the vicar
🖤 Phoebe, 15, kooky & giving full Wednesday Addams vibes

But the real star? The Face: a chalk carving on the hillside said to keep demons locked away. With the witch who guarded it gone… things are about to get very dark.
This is a slow-burn, curl-up-on-a-stormy-day kind of book. Collins’ prose is as beautiful as ever, and the 1920s atmosphere? ✨ chef’s kiss .

If you loved The Binding, you’ll adore this.

This is a book that is full of mystery and is wonderfully written, but I found myself struggling to connect with it.

This is set on the edge of a community, an artist moves into an old family home that has been run down. The new resident is a woman who worked in Europe during WWI and needs refuge and a sanctuary of sorts as she struggles with memories and nightmares. Her neighbour is the vicar's daughter, a spinster who finds the artist a fascinating woman.

A strained first meeting gradually melts into a friendship between the women. Their stories are told from the past and their present, and fill in details for the house, the area and WW1, as well as the thoughts and perceptions of the women.

This is a slower-paced story as the author gradually introduces her characters and the face that is in the wall behind the house. It is something that is part of the history and the folklore of the area. For some, it is a good thing for others, not so much.

This is a historical fiction story of friendship that I did enjoy and would recommend.

Set in post-war Sussex in one of those tiny villages where the past seems more real than the present. where the beliefs of old still hold sway in the face of Christianity. This is the background to a tale of women adjusting to life without the men killed in the war. Sapphic romance and spooky goings on, a great read from a great author.

I requested this ARC thanks to one line given in the description: ‘A haunting gothic tale of ancient darkness and a love that defies convention,’. Typically, this is 100% my kind of book that I would devour in no time. I really wanted to like this story, but for me, it just felt flat of my interpretation of that one line. I kept waiting for something more to happen that brought that line to life for me, but I just struggled through, waiting and hoping. It’s not that I particularly disliked the story, but it’s certainly not one that I would have chosen to read.
It didn’t give me the vibes I was hoping for, and this story just wasn’t for me, hence the rating. I hope it’s a winner for someone else though.
Thank you to Harper Collins and NetGalley for the eARC in exchange for my honest review.

Despite having read none of Collins' other work, nor really being a historical fiction fan, I was super intrigued by the plot of The Naked Light.

The gothic elements were well written and the post-war setting made for a pretty devastating read. Kit and Florence were fantastically developed characters and I was invested in their storyline. I definitely enjoyed the spooky elements and folklore more than the history, but on the whole it is a great book. It is a very slow, lyrical kind of novel - perfect for an Autumn evening read.

Thank you to NetGalley for the e-arc.

I am ride-or-die for Bridget Collins; steer-my-car-into-a-canyon-for-her-next-book kind of devotion. So, the email from HarperFiction inviting me to read ‘The Naked Light’ arrived like a kid-you-not gold embossed invitation to the palace.

While I hate to say anything as pedestrian as “Collins has outdone herself with this one” (because she does, after all, have over a decade in the publishing industry across multiple genres, audiences, and media), ‘The Naked Light’ is assuredly the book – her fourth full-length novel for adults – where I feel her voice has purified and distilled. I can very clearly now pick out her style and authorship amidst a line-up of contemporary fiction, even within that space she occupies on the Venn diagram where Historical Fiction, Speculative, Gothic, Paranormal, and Queer Fiction overlap.

So, how has she outdone herself? ‘The Binding’ and ‘The Betrayals’ took terrific strides into Speculative Fiction/Fantasy, and I was wholly ‘all in’ with Collins for both of those mindbogglingly specific worlds she created for them. Though, with her last novel, Collins refined her technique of affixing plot and narrative to the rig of historical setting. Just as in ‘The Silence Factory’, this latest release zones in on an explicit era of British history. But whereas the Industrial Revolution provided an exemplary speculative backdrop for Sophia Ashmore-Percy’s extraordinary story in ‘The Silence Factory’ in 2024, the narrative could just as successfully have existed lifted wholly out of time. However, the First World War not only serves as backdrop to Kit’s story in ‘The Naked Light’, but the story and its setting are correlative, causal; Kit’s story cannot be lifted outside of that one instant in history. And this overarching structural unity is the vital pin in the tumbler that springs open the lock of Collins’ artistry. With this level of cohesion, Collins’ latest novel is indisputably sound – indefectible.

This peak – prime – pristine – unity is signalled straight off by Collins’ title, ‘The Naked Light’. When many of us call to mind British poetry of the First World War (especially those of us who have taught it to countless English Lit pupils), I’m sure the names Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Edward Thomas come easily to remembrance. Yet Collins does not look to those familiar masculine accounts to cite as opening reference in this novel, but to Eleanor Farjeon. Farjeon is one of the few female poets of that era whose work has – uncommonly – prevailed, and it furnishes us with an invaluable textual record of women’s voices from this age of supreme upheaval, transformation and (imaginable) liberation for women. Bridget Collins calls in an authoritative female voice to ring the tone for this novel with Eleanor Farjeon’s poem ‘Peace’.

Key to the unity of Collins’ plot and setting is her use of imagery, and it all starts with this title. Light is the medium by which we see. Consequently, the imagery Collins carries off so tremendously is all about looking. The phrase ‘naked light’ carries an inference of something harsh or distasteful that was previously hidden, being exposed or revealed. Run this inference backwards upon itself, and what we get is obfuscation, distortion; almost the dictionary definition of literary foreboding. Bridget Collins manipulates this imagery consistently and insistently throughout the novel, playing with sight and looking, the human impulse to interpret identity from facial image, and – above all – the concept of disfigurement of faces; defacement.

As to the context of the phrase ‘naked light’ in Farjeon’s poem: in a personified voice Peace speaks in direct address to the reader. Peace counsels humankind not to ‘call me good’, cautioning, ‘my good is but the negative of ill’ and ‘my single virtue is the end of crimes’. Defining itself only as ‘the ceasing of horrors’, Peace strikes a tone of admonition, chastising warring nations for feeding upon the lives of generations of men. It warns the warring nations to dread its ‘naked light’ that, when it shines upon their darkness, will force them to – in Peace’s frightful rebuke – ‘behold what ye have done’.

The significance of Collins invoking the Farjeon poem is threefold. Firstly, it situates us in the period of the Great War while secondly heralding a female perspective on war. Thirdly and wondrously, the poem unites and therefore prefigures all of Collins’ preoccupations in this novel: women’s place in wartime; the ‘peace’ that follows war; the expectation of the possibility of love in that context; and the motif of faces. Because, in Farjeon’s poem, Peace declares to the nations it addresses, ‘I am as awful as my brother War’; war specifically, when it is reflected upon, that ‘makes the nations’ soul stand still / And freeze to stone beneath a Gorgon glare’ when, in peacetime, nations eventually come to ‘know the cost at last’. So, the power of looking can be destructive. A glare can make the soul stand still; the face of War has made the British nation’s soul stand still.

Peace also describes its own face as disfigured by wounds of war: ‘I am the face that shows its seamy scar / When blood and frenzy has lost its glamour.’ And here we climb into Collins’ plot, where our female protagonist Kit is introduced as horrified, traumatised, by this maimed face of Peace, ‘show[ing] its seamy scar’ in the mangled faces of those whom Farjeon calls ‘the father and the son […] fed endlessly’ to the ‘ravenous engines’ of warring nations. Kit has found herself in Paris painting what might be called portrait masks for these men to wear in order to hide their ‘seamy scar[s]’ from the world. In this way, Collins uses distressing imagery of faces to dig into the theme of identity post-war. The world cannot bear to look Peace in the face – Peace is the mutilated soldiers’ faces – so Kit must make images on masks: ‘as she turned to pick up her suitcase she met the gaze of one of the plaster masks, and its wound gave it a crooked sardonic smile.’ (I’d also insert here a nod to Natasha Pulley’s latest release this year, ‘The Hymn to Dionysus’, which uses the same imagery of masked faces to investigate identity.)

Substantially, the novel revolves around a gigantic geoglyph of a face; seemingly as ancient as the Uffington White Horse or the Cerne Abbas Giant. Since a glare can make a soul stand still, and the entire village of Haltington is overlooked by this face, Kit finds herself returning from France to England – fleeing the emotionally damaging work she was doing with wounded soldiers’ faces – only to be subject to precisely the same ravaging imagery here: another face. The thrust of the plot is whether Kit is to succumb to its force, whether she will identify it as the source of the sinister mood; whether its gaze is malevolent or benign (Collins writes, ‘was it a friendly face? [Florence] would not have said so. Nor was it exactly unfriendly’). In this novel, the ominous sense of mood created by this being overseen isn’t so much sombre as it is clutching, confining.

The chalk hill drawing of the Face is arguably its own ‘seamy scar’ on the landscape: lines cut into the grass of the hillside: ‘It was the simplest possible face, a face in four lines: brief horizontal eyes, vertical nose, long impassive mouth.’ The Face is genderless – fluid, expression changing as it becomes overgrown – though ‘a pattern so spare and brief that it was astonishing how clearly it was a face.’ Even so, Collins presents it as symbolically potent with female energy. It’s witchy Mrs Bones who tends to it (her final act is particularly affecting). In Florence’s remembrance of her late sister, Collins provides readers with a detailed chronicle of the Face’s association with the feminine, through pregnancy and childbirth: ‘when I was waiting for Baby to come, I would lie on the chalk [Face] and watch the clouds and dream, and I knew it would keep us both safe […]. When she did come […] I could see it from the bedroom window, […] I almost prayed to it. […]. I think it must have been the first face Baby ever saw.’ The Baby is Phoebe.

Collins makes it clear that this is not a novel about men; in fact, the men in the novel are either broken or predatory, in some cases both. Strikingly, Collins situates a rape scene actually on the Face in the beginning of the book, and this episode is looped again and again through figurative scenes of assault or proprietorial harassment by men towards our three female protagonists (we have a triple p-o-v split narrative), linking them to one another – Kit Clayton, Florence Stock, and Phoebe Manning – in the chain of loss, loneliness, and isolation. And each time Collins includes one of these scenes, it figures imagery of faces. Collins urges her readers to ponder, in these cases, whether Peace is really ‘the negative of ill’ for women. It’s a crushing authorial perspective that she has adopted, skewed to gaze at post-war ‘peace’ and ask, is it, in fact, the end of crimes and the ceasing of horrors from this female point of view?

So, gender and sexuality are represented through the leitmotifs of gazing, of faces being turned to look upon something, or of being gazed at. Nowhere is it more significant than in the relationships triangulated between our three female protagonists Kit, Florence, and Phoebe. Pivotal to this is all the gazing that takes place as Kit contemplates faces with her artist’s eye. Meaningful scenes there include Florence’s desire that Kit be drawing her face as Florence gazes out to sea, and Phoebe’s brash attempt to lure Kit into drawing her naked. The blurb and author endorsements discuss ‘a story of forbidden love’ (wow, how I despise that comp-het phrase) and ‘heroines [with a] profoundly affecting [love story]’, so I’m not giving anything away by discussing Kit and Florence’s Sapphic relationship. One of the most significant moments in terms of Collins’ leitmotif is when they are watched by Phoebe in a moment of sexual intimacy.

In fact, Phoebe – calculating, manipulative, devious – functions as the trigger, or catalyst, for much of the dramatic plot points that drive the book’s momentum, very often through the act of her gazing (as above). But not only that: there is poignancy to her destruction (defacement) of Florence’s much-loved doll’s porcelain face; she has a pointed connection to Mrs Bones, the caretaker of the geoglyph; and it is Phoebe who alerts readers to Haltington’s ‘hungry spirits’ and their appetite for animating through possession any image of a face save the geoglyph, when she illicitly displays her late mother’s photograph. She is a nexus of the novel’s uncanny energy.

Of course, with the historical setting and the Sapphic romance, comparisons will be made with Sarah Waters, and with the looming Gothic otherworldliness, to Laura Purcell – and I’m very happy if Collins is the third author in that triumvirate! ‘The Naked Light’ has the Folk Horror elements of ‘Hare House’ by Sally Hinchcliffe, ‘Mere’ by Danielle Giles, and ‘Foxash’ by Kate Worsley (or for fans of male authors, Andrew Michael Hurley and Sam K. Horton – what’s going on with tripartite names?!). ‘The Naked Light’ is radiant with emotional intensity. I ask myself, how does Collins do it again and again, like every book’s her magnum opus? I feel like she only just released ‘The Silence Factory’ and I thought her writing couldn’t get any better than that. Yet ‘The Naked Light’ is even more immersive – if that’s possible – even more chilling, even more eloquent in its articulation of the horror of misogyny and the dread suffered by women – and most particularly queer women – at the hands of men in historical settings. How does she do it? That’s the thing about Bridget Collins – I think she actually might be magic. Deep, deep gratitude to HarperFiction for an eARC.

Set just after the First World War, The Naked Light tells a a dark story of life in a small rural village where the inhabitants feel protected by the Face, a simple and ancient chalk image on a hillside , which acts as a kind of amulet against evil.
We follow the fortunes of beautiful spinster, Florence, her precocious and unsettling niece, Phoebe, and a female artist called Kit, who is haunted by the disfigured soldiers from her war work and moves into an old cottage which used to be the home of the Bone family, custodians of the Face.
The Naked Light is a slow burner but a fascinating story of womanly love, darkly Gothic in places and peppered with a heavy dash of country folklore, which serves as allegorical device bringing home the horror of war and its effects on a small community.
Bridget Collins is imaginative and writes beautifully. This is a novel that will stay with me for some time but I struggled to like or understand some of the main characters, hence my giving it three stars.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for an advance review copy of this book.

In the past Bridget Collins has written two books that I utterly adored (I still need to pick up 'The Betrayals') so I was over the moon when I received the chance to read an early copy of this one. Like both of those 'The Naked Light' is beautifully penned and has some poignant moments throughout. It has an unsettling atmosphere and sets its scene vividly. Yet I'm devastated to say that I struggled somewhat with this one. It had moments when I was hooked but others where my attention wandered and although the folklore inspired horrors at play fascinated me the characters here didn't exactly enamor me to this title.

I've got to admit that this is a tricky review for me to write as I desperately wanted to love this story. The folklore inspiration combined with an author whose written titles that I've adored in the past should have resulted in a hit for me. Yet as I said above this was a novel with wavering levels of engagement for me. The writing was lyrical, as always, and there were definite moments when the atmosphere that the author crafted sent shudders down my spine. The folklore based horrors that are uncovered over the course of the narrative are the type to make your hair stand on end yet truly fascinating to learn about. Whenever these beings came into play I was left unable to tear my eyes from the page. These scenes truly stole the show, although there was another element of the story that I also felt like the author covered in a particularly poignant light: the horrific effects of war on its survivors.

This is a novel where you don't see any of the frontlines or close up details of the atrocities within the war itself. Yet it certainly left a lasting impression on me in regards to the effect that it had upon it's soldiers. The physical damage is obvious but the psychological effect was highly uncomfortable to read about too. The attitude of one of these individuals was simultaneously heartbreaking and horrifying which I thought was a masterstroke on the author's part - to make me recoil from their attitudes yet find a level of understanding and sympathy at the very same time. There was no way I could agree with exactly what they were thinking, after all, yet it's devastating to think that someone could risk their life for their country, then get treated like a monster because of the wounds it inflicted upon them.

That particular section was only a very small segment of 'The Naked Light' however. The folklore elements made up a bigger chunk of the narrative but the largest section seemed to revolve around Florence, Kit and Phoebe which is somewhat unfortunate as I truly struggled to connect to any of them as individuals. They were all complex, layered characters but I wasn't really invested in them. Each seemed to have prickly edges or unlikable elements of their personalities that made it hard for me to truly care what happened with them; a fact that I find surprising having majorly fallen for some of the characters within the author's debut. The relationship between Florence and Kit was interesting given the attitudes of the time but I didn't really feel any kind of spark between them. And the dynamic between Kit and Phoebe made me rather uncomfortable at times if I'm being honest.

Frustratingly after a lot of highly atmospheric build up I found the folklore based events to be tied up a bit too swiftly too. Everything reached this momentous, chilling turning point then fizzled out almost all at once in a manner that felt a little bit too easy.

So ultimately I'm rather torn on this one. 'The Naked Light' had some fascinating folklore inspired ideas and was beautifully penned throughout but an inability to connect with its characters meant my interest level tended to waver, based on how firmly in the limelight those dynamics were at the time The fact that they were then tied up in a manner that left me somewhat disappointed makes it hard to say that I recommend this one. Yet its beautiful writing and intriguing ideas could work better for other readers, especially as character connection can vary a lot between readers. My honest advice would be to pick up one of the authors older books first if you're new to her work as I think the chances of a successful read there are stronger. But if you've enjoyed her work already and are intrigued with trying more by her then 'The Naked Light' is still worth taking a chance on. Hopefully it'll work better for you than it did for me. And as I've adored everything else that I've read by the author I'm still excited to see what she pens next.

I’ve really enjoyed Bridget Collins’ previous books and I’m glad to say this one didn’t disappoint either.

The post-war setting was fascinating and I enjoyed how it was explored from many different angles, from the surviving soldiers to the women left behind to the schoolgirls of the next generation. The real historical context and sense of being trapped and having no future added to the overall spookiness of the book.

The folklore element was creepy, and built up well throughout the story. I felt like maybe it was wrapped up a bit too promptly and neatly towards the end, but I definitely felt the sense of menace throughout.

The main three characters were all well-developed and intriguing, and their motives were really interesting. Florence and Kit’s relationship felt realistic and their decisions made sense for their characters and for the time period. Phoebe was also so creepy! The other characters felt more like cameos but I still got a good sense of who they were and they felt relevant to the story. The vicar was the only character who felt a bit one-dimensional.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. A good historical novel with spooky folkloric elements.

An unusual story this, with some very good ideas and plotting.
It was well written, and very readable, although few of the characters were people with whom I got very invested.
Having said that, I thought the ‘past’ sections set in Paris, and the after effects of what had happened both before that and during that time, were absolutely fascinating. A story that needs to be told.

The Naked Light by Bridget Collins
I have read several books by this author and so was very interested to see how this new book developed. It is set in the period just as the First World War draws to a close in a small village which has lost many of its menfolk. The village is overlooked by The Face on the chalk hill and we are focussed on three female characters.
There is Florence, the vicar’s sister-in-law who lives with him following her sister’s death. Phoebe is her niece who we meet first on the hill by the Face as she makes a prediction about what will happen to the last of the Bone family sons. Then there is Kit, an artist, who moves into the now empty Bone family home. Kit is haunted by the faces of the men who died in the war for whom she had to paint copper masks to cover their ravaged faces.
As the chalk Face disappears, with the Bone family no longer there to maintain it, malignant forces emerge. What Bridget Collins does so very well is to merge the minutia of daily life with the mysterious superstitions which abound in this area. The vicar himself is an expert in the stories having written a book on the subject.
Kit dresses as a man and has pursued a relationship with a woman in the past. At the heart of this novel is the sapphic relationship between Kit and Florence and the role of the “surplus women” following the war. A strange power permeates the village and it emanates from The Face.
An interesting story and one which I will be recommending at my various book groups. Many thanks to the author, to the publishers and to Net Galley for the opportunity to read the book in return for an honest review.

🎨 The Naked Light 🎨
⭐️⭐️.💫

“Not that they would have known that, but its mysterious beauty does not require modern understanding. Who could blame those who came before us if they saw its wild mystery and trembled?”

This is an arc review and this book releases September 25th.

This is a gothic novel that blends folk horror, historical fiction, and at the heart of it, a love story. Set in the isolated village of Haltington after the devastation of World War I, the story follows Florence, who feels stifled by societal expectations and Kit, a mysterious outsider who moves into the eerie Bone Cottage. At the heart of the village lies the Face, an ancient chalk carving believed to hold dark power, and as Florence and Kit’s bond deepens, they find themselves drawn into the supernatural secrets surrounding the Face.

This was absolutely spellbinding in terms of the lyrical writing, all while exploring much more complex themes of isolation, war, sexuality and acceptance. I will say I found this took me time to get into and it was slow in parts and also wasn’t as supernatural leaning as I expected but it was so atmospheric. I wish we got more on the lore and world building and supernatural element and this didn’t live up to The Binding or The Betrayals for me, both of which I loved.

This book is quietly heartbreaking, gently devastating, and softly haunting. Parts of this will stay with me.

It’s definitely thought provoking around certain hardships after WW1, things I hadn’t thought about when it comes to so many men having died and the ‘surplus’ women left in their wake, and what that meant during those times with more ‘traditional’ gender roles and close-mindedness around anything other than the heteronormative life. The mutilations and injuries of soldiers, heroes, not coming back whole, as well as perfectly encapsulating particular damaging male mindsets in terms of being ‘owed’ something from women.
The horror element, integral to the overall plot, sneaks up on you. The idea is there from the start, however it creeps into existence almost without you realising it.

Whilst I appreciate the complexities and nuances of different issues this book touches upon, it did lack something for me. It didn’t lean far enough into itself, not fully committing to being either horror or metaphor. That’s just my personal opinion though and I am sure that for others this book will be a favourite.

It’s beautifully written and brought tears to my eyes in two places. The romance side is well done (closed door/off page spice), as is the depth and complexities of the characters involved.

Plot summary
There are 3 main themes/parts to the plot for me. They interweave and overlap.
1. The aftermath of the war on men, particularly around disfigurement and not coming back whole. Kit, an artist, moved to Paris to help create masks to make their faces whole again and has been left scarred from the experience.
2. A Sapphic love story in a time where two women should not be together. Kit moves to a small cottage in a quaint town after not being able to bare the masks anymore. She meets Florence, a ‘spinster’ who was never married before the war and has even less hope of that now.
3. The folklore (and horror element) of the village, the Haltington Face. 4 white lines in the ground that resemble a human face, said to protect them from evil in shadows, however who will maintain it after the last of the Bones family passes?
I wasn’t very sure of what the plot, or the point was until around a third of the way in. However once I was drawn in and understood how these different elements all came together, then I really enjoyed how it unravelled.

What I loved:
* The fact that masks were being used to help the injured men become whole again, but also faces without a soul draw evil to them.
* Encapsulating particularly damaging male mindsets towards women and being ‘owed’ female attention.
* The chapters being titled like artwork.
* The relationship development between Kit and Florence, heartache and all.
*Phoebe as an unusual character, not really understanding her until the end.

Overall, there are several elements to the book that I enjoyed. Many ideas and issues that are thought provokingly executed and quietly heartbreaking. For my personal tastes, I would have wanted it to go one step further and have a bittersweet ending especially with Phoebe. Two parts had me in tears, but I wanted to be a little more destroyed. It was so close to doing that to me but left me.. wanting more from it. It’s not that anything is wrong with it, it just missed that particular mark for me.

If you enjoy a touch of folklore, artistic representations, sapphic love, forbidden love, slow burn romance alongside a slow burn plot with multiple sublayers and deeper meanings, then you may enjoy this!

Thank you to NetGalley and Harper Collins UK for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I was sadly disappointed in this book. I had high hopes from the blurb of a spooky, Gothic witchy tale, but instead it was more of a lesbian romance! It seems that the promise of Gothic vibes was used as a framework on which to hang lesbian literature and make it seem more mainstream - which is fine if you like that sort of thing, but alas, its really not my cup of tea.
It was beautifully written, if a little slow. There was great promise regarding the Face on the hillside, which sadly fell rather flat on reading, as the Face becomes overgrown in the first quarter of the book and isn't much mentioned again. There are a couple of paintings that seem to come alive, but again, it wasn't the spooky atmospheric read I had hoped for.
I was intrigued by the character of Pheobe and I liked her ambiguity. She was a well drawn malicious teenager. But for the most part, it just read like a lonely woman's first foray into lesbianism because the world is short of men post WW1! So I'm sorry, but this one is not for me.