A Dark Unwinding Review

This week's novel is A Dark Unwinding, YA Gothic by Sharon Cameron.

Katherine's aunt sends her to visit her uncle's estate so that she can declare him insane and her cousin can inherit the family fortune.  Katherine follows her aunt's instructions, knowing that if she deviates, her aunt will throw her out on the street.  But once she gets there, she finds that her odd uncle is an inventor of astounding clockwork contraptions, and he has employed almost a thousand people, who he plucked out of workhouses and who now live in a village on the estate, in order to run his gas works, forge, and workshops.  If Katherine has her uncle committed, her aunt will displace everyone on the estate.  The town both hates her and tries to butter her up, trying to convince her to lie for them.  And at the same time, strange things keep happening, everyone agrees the house is haunted, and Katherine starts to wonder if she's losing her mind just like her uncle.

I really liked this one.  It's historical fiction bordering on Steampunk, but the Steampunk isn't overwhelming.  It has all my favorite Gothic tropes done well. There's creepiness on the moors and a howling, eerie wind, but there's also household servants that despise Katherine and are probably up to something.  There's the question of if there's a ghost or if she's crazy, if she's being gas-lit or if the oppressive and antagonistic atmosphere is just making her antsy.  This last point is handled especially well.  There's a bit where her hairbrush keeps ending up in the wrong drawer.  There's a bit where her hat disappears and she finds it tied neatly to a point on the roof. There are secret tunnels and people popping into hallways only to vanish. There's how everyone keeps accusing her of being drunk, when we didn't see her drink anything or act oddly. Is someone moving around her hairbrush just to make her think she's losing it?  Is someone moving it because they're using her hairbrush for some weird reason?  Is she misremembering?  Is she lying to the reader?  It's creepy, and things like that keep happening, and happening in ways that sneak up on you.

I think part of why it works is because Katherine is very precise, so when her precision slips, it's jarring.  She counts everything.  A lot.  Like it seems obsessive compulsive at times.  She discovers that her uncle does this too, and they bond, but at the same time that this is exciting for her, it's also frightening, because she's there to have him institutionalized for doing things like that and maybe that means she is crazy too.  (As a note, her uncle is probably autistic, which clearly isn't catching and would have shown up in Katherine earlier if she was autistic too, but then maybe she's on the spectrum and then maybe she is autistic and no one has bothered with her and since it's from her point of view, maybe she doesn't know about it either, bringing us back to her being an unreliable narrator.)

I enjoyed the way the romance was handled here.  Dreamy Guy doesn't like Katherine since she's about to have him fired and then kick him and his family out of their house, but he also likes her because she's neat and he eventually starts to sympathize with her situation.  So when he blows hot and cold, it all makes a lot of sense and it's all upfront rather than him coming off as one of those heroes who's rude because he just has too many brooding feelings that he can't express because he's not good enough for her or blah blah blah.  As a result, there's never a time when she's confused about his feelings for her and they have a long, drawn out misunderstanding about how they do love each other.  Instead, the barriers keeping them apart are all rational, mostly because Katherine is rational to a fault.  And then there's what looks like might turn into a love triangle, but never really does, even when she's considering marrying the wrong guy.

At one point the grumpy cook/housekeeper said something amazing after being amazing for a whole novel, and I looked up, turned to my husband, and said, "I like everyone in this book."

I recommend it.

***

Next week: The Charmed Children of Rookskill Castle, British kids escaping the Blitz go to a haunted castle, by Janet Fox.