I Read Books: Belladonna

 

Belladonna

Signa Farrow is an orphan, her parents and a whole house of guests were poisoned and she, a baby, the only survivor. Death haunts her, literally, a shadowy figure that arrives when she might die. Instead others die around her, her guardians; her grandmother was good, but after that they all get worse and worse. When she’s twenty one she’ll inherit but until then she needs a guardian.

If she takes belladonna berries Death comes and she can talk to him, initially to tell him to leave her alone. She, it seems, cannot die. When her aunt Magda dies she goes to her cousins, the Hawthornes of Thorn Grove. There she finds the family in crisis. Lillian Hawthorne has died, and her husband Elijah is neglecting his business (a gentleman’s club) and holding wild parties. His daughter Blyth is ill, expected to die like her mother. His son Percy wants to take over the club; his brother Byron wants to run it properly. And Marjorie, now her governess and tutor, has as many secrets as the rest. Signa knows Thorn Grove is haunted – she can see ghosts – and must penetrate the mysteries. Perhaps her best ally is Sylas, the strangely smartly dressed and well-informed stablehand, yet even he has secrets.

I mentioned wild parties; they’re wild compared to A Lady’s Guide To Beauty And Ettiquette, the book that Signa takes as her bible, the rules honoured sometimes in the breach. So there’s a lot of tea and scones (too many scones it seems, Signa always hungry) and trying not to give away gossip and still be polite. Yet layered in are the murder mystery and family mystery and on top of all that the literal presence of Death. Signa wants to be wild and free (when she gets her inheritance) and she also wants to fit in and be respectable, and this drives some of the tension and energy of the book. If sometimes a little clunky – moving from worrying about how many scones one should eat at tea to trying to learn who a murderer is by taking poison to walk through shadows – the book manages to maintain an intriguing posh Regency adventure.

Read This: Gothic coming of age story with dark magic
Don’t Read This: Signa is Death’s very special friend and she won’t think about what that means