Title: The Widow of Pale Harbor Author: Hester Fox
Published: September 17, 2019
Genre(s): Historical Fiction
Page Count: 384
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Maine, 1846. Gabriel Stone is desperate to escape the ghosts that haunt him in Massachusetts after his wife’s death, so he moves to Maine, taking a position as a minister in the remote village of Pale Harbor.
But not all is as it seems in the sleepy town. Strange, unsettling things have been happening, and the townspeople claim that only one person can be responsible: Sophronia Carver, a reclusive widow who lives with a spinster maid in the eerie Castle Carver. Sophronia must be a witch, and she almost certainly killed her husband.
As the incidents escalate, one thing becomes clear: they are the work of a twisted person inspired by the wildly popular stories of Mr. Edgar Allan Poe. And Gabriel must find answers, or Pale Harbor will suffer a fate worthy of Poe’s darkest tales.
Mysterious. Haunting. Creepy. Riveting. Chilling. Enthralling.
These are all words that, if you asked Hester Fox probably, are meant to describe The Widow of Pale Harbor. Unfortunately, my list of words is more like: insipid, inane, overwritten, clumsy, overwrought, and silly. Put another way, I did not like this book.
While perusing critical reviews for this book on Goodreads, I saw numerous complaints that though the book is marketed as a Gothic historical in the style of Poe, it’s really more of a “trashy romance.” While I disagree with the term “trashy romance” categorically, I do agree that Hester Fox cannot write a love story to save her life. I also think that if an actual romance novelist had written The Widow of Pale Harbor, things would have gone much smoother.
The premise of the book is promising, I suppose. An angsty widower moves from Massachusetts to Maine in order to start a Transcendentalist church, but bumps up against a population of superstitious, close-minded people too busy gossiping about a rich local widow who is, clearly, a witch. Then there are some macabre displays put up around town, full of voodoo dolls, animal carcasses, etc. Then some suspicious deaths. Angsty preacher man, meanwhile, has fallen in love with the rich widow. And…yeah, that’s where things go wrong.
I 100% admit that Fox had a great idea with this book—but she absolutely lost focus within the first few chapters and struggled thereafter to keep things together. The book wants to be a Gothic mystery, but most of the pages are spent exploring the two protagonists’ absolutely self-indulgent angst and “passion” for each other. The self-flagellating and navel-gazing was infinite, interspersed with heinous florid purple prose descriptions of their emotions, for no purpose at all. I wanted to yack nearly the entire time, especially once their completely unbelievable backstories go dramatically unveiled.
Towards the end of the story, Fox does remember that she’s supposed to be writing a mystery, so she reveals the mystery with all the heavy-handedness of a troll. The villain monologue was endless and completely preposterous. The moment when the main characters vanquish this antagonist was like a “How To Write a Murder Mystery Paint-by-Numbers.” Then it’s all back to moony-eyed, nonsensical romantic melodrama. It was all so tiring and silly.
To be clear: the problem with this book is not that Hester Fox focuses too much on the romantic arc of her characters. The problem is that she absolutely has no idea how to write a convincing love story. So many readers think that all romance novels are trashy precisely because writers in other genres, when they do write a love story, are so completely shit at it. “Trashy romance” is one of the great loves of my life, but this ain’t it. The Widow of Pale Harbor is just a crappy book written by an author who has little grasp on either mysteries or romances.
