Book Review

The Shadow in the Glass by J.J.A. Harwood

TW/CW

TW: Sexual Assault, Abortion

The Shadow in the Glass is marketed as a Gothic Cinderella story, which is totally my jam, but in reality what I got was a Faustian morality tale with some Cinderella themes. It was a depressing read overall and, this is a big spoiler but an important one:

Click for Spoiler

It doesn’t have a HEA. In fact the end is very sad.

Even if I meant to read this as a Faustian morality tale, it still left some questions unanswered at the end of the novel, and not in a tantalizing way. It was as if the narrative started to go down a path, then forgot what it was doing and went somewhere else instead. It was incredibly frustrating.

The main character in this story is Eleanor “Ella” Hartley. Ella’s mother used to be in service before dying of consumption when Ella was nine. Her mother’s employers, the Pembrokes, took Ella in as their ward. Ella is a happy child until Mrs. Pembroke dies. Mr. Pembroke has nearly bankrupted the estate and has no intention of paying for Ella to have a season, so he sends her downstairs to become one of the maids.

When the book opens Ella is in crisis. She managed to save three years of wages, only to have it stolen and spent by another maid. Mr. Pembroke has been sexually abusing the staff, and Ella has seen a series of women get pregnant by him only to be thrown into the street as “loose women” and left to starve, most recently her friend, Leah. Ella’s only solace is sneaking up into the library late at night to lose herself in books.

One night she’s reading a copy of Doctor Faustus when a mysterious and deeply creepy woman appears to her:

The woman’s light brown hair was pulled back into a neat bun, threaded with silver. She was middle-aged and plump, not short, not tall. Her printed calico dress looked soft and clean. The woman would’ve looked perfectly ordinary if it hadn’t been for her eyes. They were all black, like holes through her face.

[…] In the dark, it was impossible to tell how many shadows the black-eyed woman had. Now three, now seven, now one that was far too small for her. Eleanor blinked again, trying to force herself to see properly. The black-eyed woman stayed exactly where she was, smiling comfortably in her padded armchair. Her shadows did not.

The woman offers Ella a deal. She will grant Ella seven wishes in exchange for her soul.

Ella is poor and totally reliant on a man whom she knows will attempt to sexually assault her now that Leah is gone. She decides she can use six wishes and, if she never uses the last, save her soul.

Click for some additional plot details

The problem is that the wishes do not go according to plan, and Ella soon finds out that every wish she uses will cost a life. When, in a moment of frustration and pain, she wishes that the maid who stole her money and has been terrorizing her “will just stop,” she finds the maid’s body the next day, clearly murdered. Ella doesn’t choose the person who dies. Sometimes the person killed seems chosen at random, and so she realizes she cannot use the wishes.

The heartbreaking thing about this book is that the things Ella wants are so basic and human. She wants enough money to live in safety, to not worry about starvation or disease. She wants to be able to take care of her friends who have been victimized by Mr. Pembroke. She wants to remove herself from a situation where she’s facing the possibility of rape every single day.

The novel sets this up as some sort of moral dilemma or test that Ella must face, but it’s such an unbelievably cruel and shitty situation. Ella isn’t asking for anything greedy or frivolous, and she’s forced to choose between a potential stranger dying or her winding up a victim of assault, possibly pregnant, and left on the streets to starve. I felt immense sympathy for Ella and disgust at how cruel and pointless her choice had to be.

Then there’s Charles. Charles is Mr. Pembroke’s son who has been away at Oxford and then doing a tour of the Continent. Now he is home and surprised to find his childhood playmate is living below stairs.

Charles is clearly the Prince Charming character, and it doesn’t take long for Ella to fall in love with him (and him with her), creating a conflict because Mr. Pembroke (who needs Charles to marry an heiress) will never let them be together.

If Mr. Pembroke is a villain based on violence and cruelty, then Charles is one based on his own willful ignorance. One night he sneaks up to Ella’s room with champagne:

“I’ve brought you something. May I–good Lord! Is this where you sleep?”

Where the fuck did you think she was sleeping, Charles?

He is constantly surprised by how dreary Ella’s life is because he’s never considered the lives of the servants around him. He fantasizes about marrying Ella in Gretna Green with no concept of how he could make that possible financially. He does not understand that by entering into an affair with her, he puts her even further in danger should they be discovered. He is yet another shitty option in a buffet of shitty choices.

As the novel progresses, Ella finds herself using more and more wishes simply to keep her life from imploding, but they never go according to plan.

Click for a specific example

When she wishes for financial security, she finds out she inherited great wealth from a friend of Mrs. Pembroke, but she is also suspected of the woman’s murder.

The novel toys with the idea that perhaps the black-eyed woman isn’t real, but rather Ella, in some kind of dissociative state, has committed the acts that are the “price” of her wishes. We learn that after her mother died Ella was non-verbal and prone to violent fits for a time. This is a really intriguing interpretation, but the narrative only skims the surface of it, offering up a potentially tantalizing twist, then sort of forgetting about it at the end.

I didn’t get any resolution from the end of The Shadow in the Glass either, leaving me entirely frustrated with my reading experience.

Click for spoilers about the ending

In the end Ella has used up all her wishes, but nothing has gone as planned. She’s about to be arrested for three murders. She faces down the black-eyed woman before jumping to her death. So Ella dies without experiencing any of the happiness she bartered her soul for.

It left me feeling as though the message was “don’t try to achieve things beyond your station in life” even if your station in life is one of poverty, disease and sexual assault. It wasn’t a message I could stomach.

I had wanted a Gothic Cinderella story and instead got a heartbreaking tale of a woman impoverished and indebted to a violent man and in love with his insipid son. Ella looks for escape in books, as do I, and rather than offering that, this novel simply reminded me of the precarious, often impossible situations that women in poverty face.

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The Shadow in the Glass by J.J.A. Harwood

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  1. Kit says:

    Two thoughts about this review:

    1. Am I the only one who is getting Game of Thrones incest vibes reading this?

    2. Anyone else starting to notice a lot of book blurbs don’t actually match the story lately? I mean the book I DNF’ed today suggested a steampunk romance but there was virtually anything of either.

    3. I don’t need a gloomy miserable ending in my fiction at the moment, despite many TV scriptwriters thinking we do. Skip.

  2. GraceElizabeth says:

    Can I recommend an alternative book which might better suit romance readers? TEN THOUSAND STITCHES by Olivia Atwater. It has an HEA, a Prince Charming character who’s oblivious to the lives of servants (spoiler: it is not an attractive quality) and the realities of living as ‘the help’, in an overall very uplifting context because the heroine gets her victories. I think it does a lot of the things that Elyse was looking for in this book and I was beaming at the end of it!

  3. Escapeologist says:

    @GraceElizabeth Ten Thousand Stitches sounds wonderful! My library has the audiobook on hoopla and the kindle version is currently 4.99. Reviews compare it to the Lord of Stariel which got a lot of love on SBTB.

  4. Bea says:

    It reminds me of that adolescent/spankin’ new writer tendency toward emo-porn because “pain is deep”
    *rolls eyes*

  5. Bea says:

    Ah–I went looking. “Emo-porn” as defined by fanfic writer FernWithy

    “My problem with what I call “emo-porn” is largely that it’s fake and cheap. Generally, the central character is … put upon by these horrible things that happen, and the writer seems to revel in just how much he or she can turn the thumbscrews, and how much saltwater will be spilled over it.”

  6. DiscoDollyDeb says:

    @GraceElizabeth: As the great French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard once said, “The best way to criticize a bad film is to make a better one,” which I always paraphrase as, “The best way to criticize a bad book is to recommend a similar, better one.” So thank you for your recommendation. It’s good to know there are books that can explore every type of subject matter without becoming “misery memoirs.”

  7. Mikey says:

    Going only by what’s in this review, the message of the book seems, to me, to be “Don’t sacrifice other people’s lives for your own happiness; it won’t lead to any happy endings.”

  8. Kareni says:

    @Elyse, thanks for your thoughtful review. And, @GraceElizabeth, thank you for the book recommendation.

  9. Katelynne says:

    Thank you for this review. I likely would have bought this book based on the description. You saved me some money!

  10. flchen1 says:

    @Elyse, thank you for this review. Hard pass.

  11. PamG says:

    @Mikey
    Seems like unintended consequences are the pitfall leading to the unhappy ending rather than sacrificing other people. I’d say that the moral is Read more fairy tales because wishes are ALWAYS bad news. Book sounds like a steamy pile of sh*t to avoid.

  12. Annie Kate says:

    This…seems like a fairytale allegory version of the trolley problem, which might be the least appealing book summary I’ve heard in a *while*. I’ll add in my thanks to Elyse for saving me time and frustration.

  13. Emily C says:

    @GraceElizabeth- thank you so much for the recommendation for Olivia Atwater. Looks like Ten Thousand Stitches is second in her Regency Faerie Tales series and is described as gaslamp fantasy.
    The term gaslamp fantasy was totally new to me so I went searching for more. Turns out it’s a genre I love- a mixture of 19th century England with magical, supernatural fantasy elements akin to, but not to be confused with, the sci-fi bent of steampunk.
    Per the New York Public Library website “You’ll find historical settings, gothic ambience, ballrooms, wit and romance, witches, dark magic, fairies and all manner of supernatural creatures but very little science.”
    The noted titles include some SBTB faves like Sorcery and Cecilia, Soulless by Gail Carriger and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.

  14. CakeandMonsters says:

    Sounds like they wasted a perfectly good premise. I’m all for dark twists but definitely seems like it took a sharp left turn into complete misery. Darkness is only worthwhile if the character has something to fight for; if there is no hope at all then there’s no point in continuing to read it.

  15. DiscoDollyDeb says:

    @CakeandMonsters: “Darkness is only worthwhile if the character has something to fight for.” Yes indeed. I think this is why I have no problem with reading “dark romance”—no matter what, there’s almost always hope and an HEA. Without those two elements, all that’s left is torture (physical and/or emotional) porn…and I’m not home to that!

  16. PamG says:

    Random Gaslamp fantasy rec: Glamourist Histories by Mary Robinette Kowal

  17. Emily C says:

    @PamG- I have the series on my TBR (physically, the first book is sitting on my nightstand). I absolutely devoured Kowal’s Lady Astronaut books and went searching for more from her.

  18. Lisa F says:

    I feel like this is the kind of narrative that might work as a Regency horror novel or a straight-up horror novel. If it’s being marketed as a straight-up romance of any kind, yikes. I sense it’s supposed to be a treatsie about selfishness, but Cinderella is good and kind and generous in every telling of her story.

    In any event, the whole multiple wish thing feels more like a genie narrative. Cinderella got one whole wish, ffs.

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