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It is the start of the year, the weather has chilled so far that the car needs de-icing in the morning and I am reliant on my head torch for my morning runs, and I am both driving to work in the dark, and coming home in the dark. Although, to be fair, none of the characters came off that well overall: the dog was quite endearing but unfortunately failed to make it to the end.
The narrator thinks little of the remark, but it will prove to be far more significant than she realises.She immediately insinuates herself into the household of the troubled teen girl and her handsome older brother.
Moving into of one the old, slightly run down yet quaint cottages on the estate of Hare House, exploration beckons towards it’s beautiful and wild surroundings but as the nights get colder and darker, it’s not just shadows that are looming as it becomes apparent there is a very good reason this place seems so abandoned and isolated. It was only when it moved that I could make it out, the silent hare, turning and loping away into the dark. I kept waiting for the narrative to falter, kept wondering if there’d be some development that would change the way I felt about it – but it is note-perfect all the way to the bravura ending, which made me almost squeal with glee. Hare House has been on my radar for a while and I was excited to be given an early copy of it to review. Not really sure what to make of this one and it seems a few other people have voiced the same opinion.
At first she seems to be on holiday, but then she just offers to rent on a more long-term basis, and she’s in.
It seems for a while she’s to be a positive influence but dangerous secrets and an impending snow storm will soon complicate things. And overall, the story is extremely depressing - nothing good happens to anyone, everyone is selfish, nobody is happy. A little too much meandering and not enough plot for me and I think I'd have liked a bit more folk lore threaded through it too.The locals keep to themselves, the village not easily accessible when the snow hits, an old estate house with what appears to be taxidermy gone mad on display for all to see, and a neighbour who perhaps has more secrets than Hare House. I'm left with questions that have kept me thinking about the story and what has happened, and if a book can keep my attention after I've finished it that's always a good sign for me. There was quite a lot I liked in this book - the setting and the people are quite interesting, and I‘m very fond of hares. Hinchcliffe doesn't seem to be able to make up her mind whether she's writing a supernatural thriller, or a book about mental illness, and whether there really IS a witch, and if so, if it is the narrator, Janet, Cass or the enigmatic Ann (if she actually exists). When a young woman arrives in a remote and far removed part of Scotland, looking to escape her troubled and shadowed past she may find that this place of peace and nature may not be as tranquil as she had hoped.
This is one of those books I find difficult to rate, I raced through it but at the same time I don’t think I really enjoyed it. The r est of the cast is entirely forgettable, and I actually mixed them up pretty frequently aside from the mansion owner, his sister and the MC’s neighbour, who came across as very one-dimensional.The owners of Hare House, the Hendersons, have been unlucky – perhaps even, as is later suggested, cursed. The blurb in the back mentions “a deeply unsettling modern-day tale of witchcraft” - it never got there. There was a lot that I loved about the atmosphere of this one: the southwest Scotland setting; the slow turn of the seasons as the narrator cycles around the narrow lanes and finds it getting dark earlier, and cold; the inclusion of shape-shifting and enchantment myths; the creepy taxidermy up at the manor house; and the peculiar fainting girls/mass hysteria episode that precipitated the narrator's exile and complicates her relationship with Cass.
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