Disclosure: I received a copy of this book from the publisher via Net Valley in exchange for an honest review. They give me no money, not do they in any way influence my thoughts – those are 100% my own for better or worse.
Synopsis:
Molly Pohlig’s The Unsuitable is a fierce blend of Gothic ghost story and Victorian novel of manners that’s also pitch perfect for our current cultural moment.
Iseult Wince is a Victorian woman perilously close to spinsterhood whose distinctly unpleasant father is trying to marry her off. She is awkward, plain, and most pertinently, believes that her mother, who died in childbirth, lives in the scar on her neck.
Iseult’s father parades a host of unsuitable candidates before her, the majority of whom Iseult wastes no time frightening away. When at last her father finds a suitor desperate enough to take Iseult off his hands—a man whose medical treatments have turned his skin silver—a true comedy of errors ensues.
As history’s least conventional courtship progresses into talk of marriage, Iseult’s mother becomes increasingly volatile and uncontrollable, and Iseult is forced to resort to extreme, often violent, measures to keep her in check.
As the day of the wedding nears, Iseult must decide whether (and how) to set the course of her life, with increasing interference from both her mother and father, tipping her ever closer to madness, and to an inevitable, devastating final act.
My Thoughts:
First off, if you are sensitive to self-harm, suicidal thoughts or actions, or blood in your books, this isn’t the one for you.
I’m fine with reading about all of that business, so I just kinda went for it.
Iseult is a fairly interesting character, although not particularly complex in her reasoning. All of her motivations are pretty self-explanatory, so I didn’t have to do a lot of logic-leaping. She believes that her dead mother resides within a scar in her shoulder, and that she speaks to her. Sometimes so forcefully that it shuts out everything else. And her mother isn’t all that nice. Like, she can be quite cruel – she even physically assaults Iseult from inside her own body. Is she real? Is Iseult just imagining her out of some sense of misplaced guilt over her mother’s death? Does it really matter? For the purposes of this story, it doesn’t really.
What I found so interesting about Iseult isn’t her inner mon(or mom)ologues (the style in which those were written was actually kind of off-putting, imo), it’s that she herself has a surprising amount of depth, even though her motivations didn’t. She isn’t just the sum of her loveless relationships, her guilt, or her self-harm. She still clearly just wants to be loved – by her mother, by her father, by anyone really, but she’s so entrenched in her own self-abuse (and her inner mother/monologue’s abuse) that she can’t hold onto the reality that she is loved by Mrs. Pennington, at the very least. She can’t hold onto any real happiness or positive feelings because her mother/”mother” won’t allow her to.
It’s an interesting story. I wish that there had been a little bit more tension placed on Iseult’s internal battle with her mother. I mean, there was certainly some, but I feel like in order to truly justify that ending (which, in spite of the fact that it wasn’t particularly surprising, was nonetheless shocking in how it all played out), it would have been helpful to have just a little bit more meat to the fighting.
My Rating:
I definitely recommend if you’re in the mood for something dark, and fairly emotionally heavy.
The Unsuitable By Molly Pohlig Henry Holt & Co. Horror, Historical Fiction ISBN: 1250246288 ISBN13: 9781250246288 Expected Publication: April 14, 2020
