Halloween is just around the corner and it’s my favorite time of year. I love kids getting to dress up as adorable pumpkins or superheroes, my getting to buy bulk Reese Peanut Butter Cups and pretend like they’re for trick or treaters when the bag is totally going in my freezer, and my reading all of the spooky books and movies that get released.

The Witch of Willow Hall immediately caught my eye with its tie-in to the Salem Witch Trials, excellent Gothic cover, and potential for female rage. While this book is deeply creepy, and while it has  an excellent love story, that female rage never quite took off.

I do want to give some CW/TW here.

In terms of scariness, I’d stay it’s a medium. We get some creepy ghosts and eerie shenanigans, but nothing overwhelmingly terrifying. It does contain a heavy sense of dread and wrongness that I love about Gothic fiction, and that uneasiness may bother some readers.

Now, be aware: this book opens with violence against a very young animal. I passed it along to a friend, and to SB Sarah, with the warning DO NOT READ THE FIRST CHAPTER. The first chapter is really upsetting. Violence to animals is one of the things that I struggle with in fiction (and in fact, obviously). I read that scene really fast, on an airplane, and immediately hit the call light for one of those little bottles of wine. Then I went home and kissed my cats like a million times until they were squirming to get away from me.

I’m going to spoil the first chapter here so if you want to read the book, you can do so without kitten death.

Cut to years later. It’s 1821 and Lydia Montrose is nineteen. A family scandal has sent her brother to live in London, and her family to the Massachusetts town of New Oldbury. Catherine, the oldest, prettiest Montrose sister, is in some way responsible for the scandal although we don’t find out how until later. Lydia’s mother is basically a shell of her former self, unable to deal with the gossip or anything else really. Catherine is too shallow to care about much and Lydia’s dad is busy running a mill, so that leaves Lydia to more or less raise her eight-year-old sister Emeline. In a creepy old house. In exile.

A+ parenting, Montroses.

If shitty absentee parents will ruin a book for you, then maybe don’t read this, because the Montrose parents are super useless and awful. All the adulting falls to Lydia.

The house they move to, Willow Hall, is super creepy and Gothic. Almost immediately Lydia starts seeing ghosts and questioning her sanity. Emeline starts talking about an imaginary little boy she wants to play with.

Then there’s John Barrett, a handsome young man her father is in business with. He used to live at Willow Hall, or rather in the building that burned down which Willow Hall was built over. He doesn’t seem happy to see the Montrose girls or to find out his business partner is living on his former property.

There’s a really lovely romance in this book between John and Lydia, although it’s all fits and starts. Lydia was engaged back in Boston but le scandale led to her fiancé breaking it off. Catherine is bored in the country and petty so she immediately starts flirting with John and his friends to be spiteful. Lydia is awkward and uncertain, and John is shy and bad at saying what he’s thinking, and their relationship is very Austenish in its misunderstandings and frustrated gestures and “my God can’t you two people talk?!”

Honestly, I was surprised how this gentle sort of courtship flourished amid the much creepier elements of the book. Kudos to the author for that.

Like I said, Lydia starts seeing ghosts, and when a very bad thing happens, that same ragey-uncontrollable feeling hits her again with some consequences. It’s through one of those ghosts that Lydia learns of her true heritage, and a power that could see her burned at the stake.

I really enjoyed this book. I wish I could delve more deeply in the incredibly spooky, ghostly shenanigans that go down, but it’s really best experienced in the moment. The author does a fantastic job balancing a Gothic sense of dread with a burgeoning romance, weaving in awfulness with hope.

My frustration with the book lies with the fact that the heroine, Lydia, had to do all the emotional labor (and physical labor, really) for her really shitty family with little payoff. Her rage-powers are explored, but not to the extent I’d hoped for. I never really forgave her mom for having the vapors and vanishing on her kids or her dad for being absentee. I also felt that the villain got far too light a punishment.

So while The Witch of Willow Hall filled my craving for spookiness and for romance, it left my bloodthirsty side a little underwhelmed. It was still an excellent book for the season–as long as you skip the first chapter.