Her Little Flowers by Shannon Morgan
Readers of Eve Chase, Kate Morton, and Anita Frank will devour this bewitchingly atmospheric, melancholy modern ghost story set in the lush hills of England’s Lake District. There, a solitary women’s quiet life spent in her crumbling ancestral manor house with the company of a child’s ghost is dramatically interrupted when her estranged sister returns to share a horrific story of cruelty and desperation from decades earlier…
Francine Thwaite has lived all her fifty-five years in her family’s ancestral home, a rambling Elizabethan manor in England’s Lake District. No other living soul resides there, but Francine isn’t alone. There are ghosts in Thwaite Manor, harmless and familiar. Most beloved is Bree, the mischievous ghost girl who has been Francine’s companion since childhood.
When Francine’s estranged sister, Madeleine, returns to the manor after years away, she brings with her a story that threatens everything Francine has always believed. It is a tale of cruelty and desperation, of terror and unbearable heartache. And as Francine learns more about the darkness in her family’s past—and the role she may have played in it—she realizes that confronting the truth may mean losing what she holds most dear.
As moving and poignant as it is chilling, Her Little Flowers is a story of grief and enduring love—and of the haunting regrets only forgiveness can dispel.
Review:
I received an advance copy of this book courtesy of the publisher via Goodreads in exchange for an honest review.
This was a nice little unexpected surprise. I hadn’t heard much about this book – in fact I read the synopsis several months ago, thought it sounded good and added it on Goodreads. A few weeks later I received a notification that there was a giveaway for it on Goodreads, so I entered the giveaway and then kind of forgot about it. I ended up winning a copy and when the book arrived in the mail I had just finished what I was reading, so I sat down and read the first couple of chapters of this one and I was hooked. I love when that happens!
The overall premise is that Francine is a 50-something year old woman who lives in an old English manor (too small to be considered a mansion but too large to be considered a house). She’s an odd bird – she lives without a cell phone or a computer, but she’s perfectly happy. She is also able to see ghosts, which makes her the talk of the town. Francine doesn’t really mind, though. She’s always been the topic of town gossip ever since her abusive father disappeared when she was young, leaving her, her sister Madeleine alone with their eccentric mother.
Francine spends most of her time bumbling around the manor, and Bree, the spirit of a young girl, keeps her company. Bree has been Francine’s “friend” for as long as she can remember. She’s mostly happy with her simple life, but when Madeleine returns home and brings with her some disturbing news, the life Francine knows turns on its head. What really happened the night their father disappeared? Why, suddenly, is there an evil spirit crashing through the manor and the forest that surrounds it almost as if it’s out for revenge, and what secret was their mother keeping from them?
This one had all the good, creepy elements that I would expect from a good ghost story. We had the manor surrounded by a forest and next door is an abandoned asylum and a huge graveyard. We have a wild entity that suddenly appears when an estranged sibling returns after being away for a while, and a deep, dark, family secret that connects everything together.
As I mentioned earlier, I hadn’t heard a whole lot about this book, and I entered the giveaway on a whim because I was in the mood for a good ghost story. While I enjoyed myself while reading it, I wasn’t totally blown away, mostly because I had a really difficult time with the way Francine and Madeleine’s mother handled the big bad thing that happened so many years ago when her husband disappeared. The author explained why the mother behaved the way she did, but it didn’t hit right for me.
The book is fun, and has some really creepy moments. At times it reminded me of the movie “The Conjuring” and some scenes that reminded me of “The Haunting of Bly Manor” on Netflix. Even with the slight irk that I have with this one, I would still recommend it to lovers of ghost stories. (I realize I haven’t really said what that irk is mainly because if I were to say more I would give away a big part of the mystery and I don’t want to do that.) Halloween is coming up, and this is the perfect book to cuddle up with on a cool fall night.
