Wow! It’s been forever since I did one of these. Sorry about that.
I’ve been super busy and haven’t had much free time to read. But then, I found out the Libby app has audiobooks!
Just Like Home is the second Sarah Gailey book I’m reviewing for this series. The first was Upright Women Wanted, which you can find here.
The way that Gailey handles narratives was just so intriguing to me. They would be so flippant yet confident about their world-building that I decided to find another Gailey book. I needed to see if they would be my new favorite author or if this was just a fluke.
Just Like Home is a physiological/gothic horror story that follows Vera Crowder, a woman who has to return home because her estranged mother, Daphne, is dying. Vera hadn’t been in town for a while because her father, Francis Crowder, was a serial killer, and the house was the site of its crimes. The story alternates between adult Vera fighting personal demons and child Vera experiencing the traumas that put them there.
During the current events of the book, Daphne is getting income by claiming that the house is haunted and renting the guesthouse. The current tenant is James Duvall, an artist and the son of the man who wrote a tell-all book about Francis. This makes Vera immediately distrust him, and his presence adds tension to her and her mother’s already shaky relationship.
Since the first night that Vera returned, she has been haunted by nightmares. She keeps hearing things in her room. Almost as if something or someone is rooting around in her room. Vera also begins to find scrapes of paper from her father’s never uncovered notebook all over the house that neither of the other occupants knows about.
The more time I spent with this book, the less I enjoyed it. There are a couple of things about the story that contributed to this. The main one is Vera herself.
Vera has a “the world owes me happiness” vibe to her that I can’t really get behind. I think it’s the way that the flashbacks are framed. We are told that her mother was distant and has always been, that her father was very loving a protective of her, and that since his arrest, she has had no one, but the story seems to gloss over all the bad things that she did which lead to her mother’s final and complete rejection.
I don’t have a problem with morally gray or even morally wrong characters. They can be some of the most compelling characters in a story, but a problem arises when the story excuses or justifies the characters’ wrongdoings. Because to that point, that story is endorsing the behavior. By the end, the story does just that.
The whole finale can be boiled down to a temper tantrum that Vera was having because of a baseless assumption she made about her inheritance from a woman who cut ties with her years ago.
The second thing about this book that ruined it for me is something I can’t discuss without spoiling the ending. I will try to be vague about the spoilers, but it’s still too much information for someone who wants to read this book blind. This is your warning.
I mean it!
Welp here goes. ( ﹁ ﹁ ) ~→
The story hard pivots into supernatural horror after 20+ chapters of psychological horror. While Gailey’s world-building does interweave this reveal into earlier elements in the story, I still had a hard time adjusting to it. Until then, I didn’t think that the world the story took place in was all that different from ours, so sudden yet well-explained horror elements needed to be reconciled in my mind. However, the rapidly approaching finale prevented me from doing just that.
Ultimately, the horror aspects don’t contribute much to the bigger picture. The story is almost over, Vera has a conflict to resolve, and there is a property battle to fight. The monster might as well have stayed under the bed because all it really did was dig a massive pothole.
Vera has the assumption that she is inheriting the family house but learns that she’s not. The final conflict of the story revolves around Vera fighting to change that. The thing is that nothing is stopping the will from being changed to ensure that she will inherit it.
I’m gonna rate this book a 2 murder house out of 5. Most of the book was great, but the ending soured it for me.
I Think Thinks 