Spoilt Creatures Review

This book came to be through Goodreads, as one of my friends had it on her TBR and the plot looked interesting enough for me to buy it the next time I went to my local Waterstones. The plot follows Iris, a newly single thirty something year old woman, fresh off her breakup and living with her mother, working a mediocre job as she learns of Breach House. This place was promised to be a kind of commune for women who want to get off the grid and find support in other women. But once she moves to that place, it soon becomes clear that this place is not all that it was promised it would be at the start. Unfortunately, I did not care too much for this book and what
was happening in it.

Perhaps the issue was simply in the expectations I had of this book. I expected a more unhinged Yellowjacket style of narrative, examining how isolation and cult-like following can lead to insane outcomes, but it left me feeling quite disappointed as all the themes it touched upon were left on a pretty shallow level, without truly examining it further in a way I expected. Often, it would be Blythe, the de facto ruler, who would just throw surface level feminism sentences, which I am still not sure if we as readers were supposed to accept as the novel’s understanding of it or to show us that Blythe is at the level of control that she can just say whatever and the other women would follow. This is never truly examined in the novel, and this was missing.

The story is told from only Iris’s perspective as the newcomer to the already established group of women where they lived under a certain set of rules, and this approach could have been so interesting as she would be the one questioning everything and trying to understand how a place like this exists and functions for so long. While she does do that at the start, soon she is seduced by the freedom she feels while she is inside this place. On one hand, this is logical, as it shows how easy it is to fall under a spell of a place like this, even ignoring a plethora of red flags all over the place. But unfortunately, this left a lot of potential untapped. There was never truly any explanation of how this place truly came about, how it recruited women into its numbers, how Blythe became that powerful that she could do whatever she wanted. Again, this could have been used to give the Breath House an air of mystery, but instead it was actually a plot hole that was so painfully obvious throughout the story.

Additionally, a story focuses a lot on the estranged relationship between Iris and her mother and her mother’s seeming inability to parent effectively. This was fine most of the time and was probably the most successful part of the novel. The revelation of the story related to her father was emotional and it was genuinely a well written twist. It was unexpected and it made sense in the context of the story, also explaining Iris’s mother’s attitude towards being a wife and a mother. At the end, rare moments of tenderness and gentleness between mother and daughter were more effective because of it.

However, what was missing the most was the relationship between women on the farm. The relationship between Iris and Hazel, the woman that brought her to the farm is dedicated a lot of time, but in the attempt to make it something undefined left it feeling underwhelming. Hazel as the character was the same, and unfortunately it led to her being a very underdeveloped character. Of course not every person in the novel has to have extensive background story and deep characterization, but with Hazel, as all of it was coming from Iris, until the end of the novel, there was not much substantial in her. The other women were not much better either, and the air of feeling like she was better than them for whatever reason kept coming off from Iris both as the narrator and the character which felt quite against the point of a novel like this.

In addition to all of this, there was also a problem of pacing. For a huge section of the novel, it was quite slow, which made sense as the purpose seemed to be the introduction to the house and the rules. But once the actual conflict began, it all ended quite quickly and unsatisfactory. The consequences of the events were clear and real and well established, but the events leading up to it made them so obvious that it was a bit of a drag to get to the big climax of the story.

In one word, the biggest problem I had with this story was that it felt too sterile, too safe. It was marketed as the women going off grid and something bad happening after the rules were broken. This led me to believe that it would be wild, unhinged women letting loose before tragedy struck. There was so much space for serious conversation about feminism and relationships between women, both romantic, platonic and in families. Instead, it was very bland, as if the author was afraid to truly let go and actually go deep into what would happen in a place like this, once the utopia wore off. Perhaps this was a case of missed expectations and this is on me for expecting something from a book that never claimed to be that. However, what was offered here simply failed to meet any expectations truly. It did the writing sin that I hate the most, which is to take a very interesting premise and then not do much of anything with it.

I rated this one ⅗ for the premise mostly and because this a debut novel and I decided to be a bit more milder.