The Stats
📖 BOOK REVIEW⠀📚
BOOK: This Poison Heart
AUTHOR: Kalynn Bayron @kalynnbayron
Publisher: Bloomsbury YA @bloomsburyya
Stars: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Published: June 29, 2021
The Review
✨ The Title/Cover Draw:
- I really liked Cinderella is Dead and this was her next book! Also very happy this is the first in the series. Thank you to @Netgalley for allowing me to read an advance copy of this book.
💜 What I liked:
- How this story was rooted in Greek lore and magical realism. It is also a bit influenced by the Secret Garden (one of my favorite childhood stories), but the majority of the story is original. This is a calm story with a little bit of mystery.
😱 What I didn’t like:
- There is a little romance that seems to happen without a lot of time to develop chemistry or foreshadowing. I would have liked to see a little more attraction between the characters before jumping into things.
💁♀️ The Characters:
- Briseis moves to an ancestral home with her moms when her aunt dies. She meets Karter and Marie who helps her discover it’s secrets.
🚦 The Ending:
- WOOOO a cliffhanger! I need more!
💭 Consider if you like:
- Fable meets Lore meets Secret Garden.
I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own. Received from Netgalley.
📘 Summary:
Darkness blooms in bestselling author Kalynn Bayron’s new contemporary fantasy about a girl with a unique and deadly power.
Briseis has a gift: she can grow plants from tiny seeds to rich blooms with a single touch.
When Briseis’s aunt dies and wills her a dilapidated estate in rural New York, Bri and her parents decide to leave Brooklyn behind for the summer. Hopefully there, surrounded by plants and flowers, Bri will finally learn to control her gift. But their new home is sinister in ways they could never have imagined–it comes with a specific set of instructions, an old-school apothecary, and a walled garden filled with the deadliest botanicals in the world that can only be entered by those who share Bri’s unique family lineage.
When strangers begin to arrive on their doorstep, asking for tinctures and elixirs, Bri learns she has a surprising talent for creating them. One of the visitors is Marie, a mysterious young woman who Bri befriends, only to find that Marie is keeping dark secrets about the history of the estate and its surrounding community. There is more to Bri’s sudden inheritance than she could have imagined, and she is determined to uncover it . . . until a nefarious group comes after her in search of a rare and dangerous immortality elixir. Up against a centuries-old curse and the deadliest plant on earth, Bri must harness her gift to protect herself and her family.
From the bestselling author of Cinderella Is Dead comes another inspiring and deeply compelling story about a young woman with the power to conquer the dark forces descending around her.