Book Review: The Quiet Stillness of Empty Houses by L.V. Russell

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“It was a comfort to her, to be weighed down by the love she carried for those she had lost.”

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Following her father’s death, orphan Theodora Corvus lives with her grandmother in their decaying ancestral estate. She locks her grief deep within, hears the mansion’s whispers, and sees black-eyed specters watching and waiting by the lake. A house, after all, absorbs feelings, and Theodora has always been attuned and aware.

And when she takes a job at Broken Oak Manor, where she’ll serve as governess to 8-year-old Ottoline Thorne, daughter of Lord and Lady Thorne, Theodora must leave her beloved home to travel north. Upon arrival, she finds the lady absent, the housekeeper stern, the lord magnetic, the child reserved, and the manse full of mysteries and shadows. Who walks the halls in the dead of night, what’s locked inside the attic, and where is Lady Thorne?

Filled with captivating prose, The Quiet Stillness of Empty Houses is a sumptuous, atmospheric gothic mystery that offers a unique take on the haunted house. The melancholic storyline exudes longing and woe, creating immersive, foreboding, chilling, and ultimately riveting settings, forming a page-turning narrative of time and trauma surrounding love, loss, loneliness, and heartache; silence, sorrow, scandal, and salvation; fear, memory, eternity, and mortality; wishes, adventures, ephemerality, and truths; and darkness, evil, secrets, and partings.

It’s a story of opportunity, accidents, intentions, reality, and romance where happiness may exist in unforeseen places and truth can be something entirely different than expected. It’s a divine reading experience capped off with epistolary interjections and an absolutely gorgeous cover that makes this reader eager for more L.V. Russell and Quill & Crow Publishing House titles!

🖤Amanda

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