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A review by tips_and_tropes
If I Stopped Haunting You by Colby Wilkens
3.0
This book has so much potential. I have been making an effort to read more diverse books, and If I Stopped Haunting You is the debut novel from Colby Wilkens, a self described queer white and Choctaw-Cherokee author with a heart for adventure. It's two feuding writers who end up tricked into going on a writing retreat with a group of well meaning friends at a haunted castle in Scotland. It's checking all the boxes for me, especially as a spooky season girlie, but unfortunately it just didn't all come together in the end.
I was immediately drawn to the character of Penelope Skinner. She's a frustrated writer who is part white and part indigenous. I am also of mixed parentage, so some of her thoughts and feelings are very familiar to me. The added stress and unrest from her inner identity politics has impacted both her writing career and her personal relationships. She's especially critical of Neil Storm, a best selling author whose horror stories are praised for breaking Native stereotypes. Penelope doesn't see it that way, and that's where the story starts to go off the rails for me.
The level of anger and lack of impulse control Pen is working with make her tough to like. She comes off as childish and petty, and vindictive at times. She's so seemingly closed off to any but her own experience struggling to publish authentic Native stories that she can't or won't look deeper at Neil to see and understand that what a writer intends isn't always what ends up in the hands of readers due to the marketing and politics of publishing. All she sees is his success by telling less than authentic stories of Native people. That whole plot is pretty esoteric in a book that's blurbed as a being full of "spooky chills and sexy thrills". The scares are more eerie than scary to me (I realize that's subjective), and the spice also fell a little short in my mind. I think that may be because I had such a hard time wanting Pen to succeed and seeing how Storm could be interested in light of her behavior.
Overall, there were parts I really enjoyed, but I'm left feeling frustrated by unrealized potential.
Thank you to Netgalley and St. Martin's Press/St. Martin's Griffin for the ARC opportunity.
I was immediately drawn to the character of Penelope Skinner. She's a frustrated writer who is part white and part indigenous. I am also of mixed parentage, so some of her thoughts and feelings are very familiar to me. The added stress and unrest from her inner identity politics has impacted both her writing career and her personal relationships. She's especially critical of Neil Storm, a best selling author whose horror stories are praised for breaking Native stereotypes. Penelope doesn't see it that way, and that's where the story starts to go off the rails for me.
The level of anger and lack of impulse control Pen is working with make her tough to like. She comes off as childish and petty, and vindictive at times. She's so seemingly closed off to any but her own experience struggling to publish authentic Native stories that she can't or won't look deeper at Neil to see and understand that what a writer intends isn't always what ends up in the hands of readers due to the marketing and politics of publishing. All she sees is his success by telling less than authentic stories of Native people. That whole plot is pretty esoteric in a book that's blurbed as a being full of "spooky chills and sexy thrills". The scares are more eerie than scary to me (I realize that's subjective), and the spice also fell a little short in my mind. I think that may be because I had such a hard time wanting Pen to succeed and seeing how Storm could be interested in light of her behavior.
Overall, there were parts I really enjoyed, but I'm left feeling frustrated by unrealized potential.
Thank you to Netgalley and St. Martin's Press/St. Martin's Griffin for the ARC opportunity.