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Title: The Girl from Rawblood
Subtitle: A Novel
Author: Catriona Ward
Narrator: Liz Pearce, Steven Crossley, John Keating, Eizabeth Sastre, Jenny Sterlin
Format: Unabridged
Length: 14 hrs and 25 mins
Language: English
Release date: 03-10-17
Publisher: Recorded Books
Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 5 votes
Genres: Fiction, Historical
Publisher's Summary:
In 1910, 11-year-old Iris Villarca lives with her father at Rawblood, a lonely house on Dartmoor. Iris and her father are the last of their name. The Villarcas always die young, bloodily. Iris knows it's because of a congenital disease that means she must be strictly isolated. Papa told her so.
Forbidden to speak to other children or the servants, denied her one friend, Iris grows up in solitude. But she reads books. And one sunlit autumn day, beside her mother's grave, she forces the truth from her father. The disease is biologically impossible. A lie to cover a darker secret. The Villarcas are haunted, through the generations, by her. She is white, skeletal, covered with scars. Her origins are a mystery, but her purpose is clear. When a Villarca marries, when they love, when they have a child - she comes, and death follows. Iris makes her father a promise: to remain alone all her life. But when she's 15, she breaks it. The consequences of her choice are immediate and horrific. Iris' story is interwoven with the past, the voices of the dead - Villarcas, taken by her.
Iris' grandmother sets sail from Dover to Italy with a hired companion, to spend her final years in the sun before consumption takes her. Instead she meets betrayal and a fate worse than death. Iris' father, his medical career in ruins, conducts unconscionable experiments to discover how she travels in the Villarca blood. Iris' mother, pregnant, walks the halls of Rawblood whispering to her, coaxing her to come. As the narratives converge, Iris seeks her out in a confrontation that shatters her past and her reality, revealing the chasm in Iris' own fractured identity. Who is she? What does she desire? The answer is more terrible and stranger than Iris could have imagined.
Members Reviews:
fever-filled dream of a gothic tale with over-wrought, curlicued languagethat somehow ties together multiple POVs and times
4.5 stars, actually.
This is a book with potent griefâthe griefs of many generations of women ill, poor, or unprotected in the wild moors of Devon.
Grief that penetrates your skin, and sinks in, curdling your dreams.
Itâs a story of a family, and those they make family by loving them, haunted by a spectre of a white-clad girl with black eyes full of fury, and the house that calls to them across time and space: Rawblood.
This is gothic story-telling in its purest, vocabulary-rich form. There are multiple points of view and multiple times depicted here weaving together until you discover that its all one story after all.
But it is confusing at times. I lost the thread several times. But the language, it does make you forgive much.
Hereâs a snippet of the wooing of one of the central couples:
âYou tell me that I am cold,â said Don Villarca. âYou say that I am cloaked in despair. All this is true. I have led what people call a sinful life. I think that all my virtue is dried up, withered away. Sometimes, I walk through it in my dreamsâthe interior of my heart. It is like a black land, where black flags hang in tatters and venomous plants grow in sickly clumps and serpents writheâA deadly night garden, my heart.â
âI know it,â she said. Her breath came a little faster.
âBut,â said Don Villarca.
