A long time ago, I tried to read Cinder by Marissa Meyer. I'm not sure what it was that happened but I ended up putting the book down. A few years later, I saw that Meyer had continued with her series of retellings and randomly picked up Scarlet and started to read. I finished the book by lunchtime. I finished Cress and Winter by the next day and then finally picked Cinder up and tried it again. I LOVED the last 3 books of the series but I only just liked the first one. It's just the way things go sometimes with books. You can love some books from an author but sometimes one book of theirs just doesn't click with you the way you expect it to and that is perfectly fine. Unfortunately, that was the case with The House Saphir and me.
The House Saphir follows Mallory Fontaine, a young woman who has made a living giving tours through the Saphir house in her town, the site where the Count Bastien Saphir murdered his first wife. Mallory calls herself an expert, she knows all the details about the mansion. She's also a fraud, working with her sister to sell fake spells to patrons, and setting up the house to scare her customers in the hopes of getting a good tip at the end. But her fortunes change when Armand, heir of the Saphir line, comes looking for the Fontaine sisters, hoping they can help him to rid the country manor of the ghost of the Count himself, who came back through the veil some years earlier. Mallory sees this as the perfect opportunity to get enough money for herself and her sister. Who cares if the only thing Mallory is able to do is talk to ghosts? She'll make sure that Armand believes she's a witch who can get rid of the ghost, no matter what it takes. But when another murder happens on the property while the sisters are there, Mallory is forced to figure out who is behind it. Is it the ghost of Monsieur Le Bleu, or is the murderer someone mortal on the property? And does Mallory have enough witch in her to put a stop to it before someone else dies?
The story of Bluebeard has been used in a few retellings, following a man known for marrying his wives and then killing them in some bloody manner. When I heard that Meyer was working on her own retelling, I waited for the right opportunity to preorder a copy. I thought it would be a great mix, Meyer, an author whose retellings I'd been keeping up with for years and Bluebeard, a bloody fairytale just waiting to be retold again. For all intents and purposes, I did LIKE this book. At the same time, there are things that held me back from LOVING this book, which bums me out so much.
The first thing that bugged me about this book was the lead, Mallory Fontaine. Oh good grief, I wanted to wring this child's neck. She drove me absolutely bonkers. Every action of hers was motivated by her greed, her intent was to swindle anyone and everyone. When confronted with the truth, she still made every claim that it had nothing to do with what she had done and while I listened to this audiobook, I found myself talking back to this kid, griping at her, snapping when she'd done yet something else that made me want to throw my hands up in despair. I might have banged my head on the counter a few times because please, let me smack her, just once, she needs to get her head straight, she can't possibly be this obstinate, there has to be something redeemable about her. And yet no, the hits just kept coming with this girl, I rolled my eyes so much I think I pulled a muscle. I tried to give credit to Meyer for an unlikable lead that would get some kind of redeeming story arc but honestly, by the end of the book, I barely tolerated her, it was the characters around her that made her into something a little better. Since the book is from Mallory's point of view, it was difficult to finish it. I wanted to put this down so many times but I stuck it out because I wanted to know if the twist I'd thought of was correct and I liked the ghosts of the murdered wives. Even Mallory's sister, Anais, did nothing to redeem Mallory. If Anais wasn't stealing the many shiny things that caught her attention, then she was just there to let Mallory repeat over and over that they were there at the mansion to get their money, it didn't matter that they couldn't help Armand, the money was all that mattered. Excuse me while I get something to bang my head against, won't be a moment.
The next thing that just didn't work for me was the romance. When Armand is introduced, it seemed like he could be an interesting character. Here was a guy who mostly understood who Mallory was, a young woman who had been trespassing on his property for who knows how long, conducting tours based on his murderous ancestor. But the moment the Fontaine sisters end up on the property, Armand is not given as much development as he needed to make him interesting. He has an interest in plants, which is "different", I guess because what kind of wealthy young man takes the time to learn about plants and then grows his own? Armand is worried about becoming something like his ancestor and what is left of his staff seem to treat him like family but every moment he spends with Mallory is filled with lingering glances and attempts to spend time one on one with her and I'm sitting here thinking why is this moving so fast? Where is the banter that makes a reader smile and yearn and maybe even swoon? The effort might have been there from Armand at times but Mallory is such a drag, it all falls to the side. When Mallory starts to reflect on how handsome Armand is, just randomly and out of the blue sometimes, it felt shoehorned in because it needed to be there, not because the romance was developing at a natural pace. Both of these characters could have been more. I'm sorry their story didn't resonate enough with me to like them together.
I liked the ghosts of the dead wives but there wasn't a lot of them on the page. I liked the background of the Fontaine sisters but it feels like there is a lot of story missing there. Maybe Meyer is saving that for companion pieces but who knows? I liked the reveals about certain plot points involving the ghost and his intentions but the overall impression of Monsieur Le Bleu was that he was just a bad guy, that was it. The book overall felt very surface level, maybe barebones, without enough to make the story really feel intriguing. It's just there and meh, and that makes me feel so tired because I wanted this to be absolutely brilliant. I know Meyer has the ability to make me love her books but this one just made me feel like it tried too hard to make Mallory not like other girls and characters like that just bug me. In the end, what saved this for me was everything except the main plot and that is not enough to make me a fan of the book.
The audiobook was an interesting experience for me. While I liked narrator Rebecca Soler, I continuously felt like I didn't know what the time period of the book was. Soler had a very clear and distinct way of speaking but for me, it made the book feel like it was set in modern times. Also, every now and then, there were moments where lines were looped in that sounded different from the original production. The story would be flowing and then suddenly the voice sounded like it was closer than it was before, louder too, which was jarring enough to make me stop the book and rewind it so I could listen to it again. I know there is a lot that goes into the production of audiobooks and I am very grateful for all the work the narrator and the team go through to make this audiobook available for readers. If anyone part of that process reads this point, I hope it helps with making future audiobooks sound a little smoother with the transitions in piecing together the audio sessions. It just needs a little tweaking to make it sound seamless, otherwise it was great work.
Rating on my scale? 4 Stars. It started out strong enough, it felt like it would be my kind of book, but then Mallory proved over and over again that she was not a girl I was going to click with and it all went downhill from there. Read if you want to see a new take on the Bluebeard tale but be wary of girls determined to prove they're master con artists when the reality is far from that.
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