REVIEW: The Wrong Girl

By Denise @ Life With No Plot on June 27, 2024 • ( 0 )

About the Book

Title: The Wrong Girl

Author: C.J. Archer

Series: 1st Freak House Trilogy #1

Genre: YA Fantasy

Pages: 217

Edition Read: Kindle eBook

Dates Read: May 26-28, 2024

Blurb: It’s customary for Gothic romance novels to include a mysterious girl locked in the attic. Hannah Smith just wishes she wasn’t that girl. As a narcoleptic and the companion to an earl’s daughter with a strange affliction of her own, Hannah knows she’s lucky to have a roof over her head and food in her belly when so many orphans starve on the streets. Yet freedom is something Hannah longs for. She did not, however, want her freedom to arrive in the form of kidnapping.

Taken by handsome Jack Langley to a place known as Freak House, she finds herself under the same roof as a mad scientist, his niece, a mute servant and Jack, a fire starter with a mysterious past. They assure Hannah she is not a prisoner and that they want to help her. The problem is, they think she’s the earl’s daughter. What will they do when they discover they took the wrong girl?

Review

I’m glad I finally read this one – it’s been on my Kindle for years. I think I got it for free through BookBub, but just never got around to reading it.

I really enjoyed this as a mystery, not just as a fantasy. There are so many things that just don’t add up in the beginning. Hannah and Violet, the earl’s daughter, are mostly kept in the attic of the house, with only occasional walks outside – why? Violet seems to be able to start fires on her own, but Hannah? She just falls asleep. Is she just there so that Violet has company? How did she come to be in the earl’s household in the first place? The starting premise had so many interesting possiblilties!

When Hannah is kidnapped by Jack (pretending to be a gardener), she gets even more questions. Jack is also a fire starter and he and his uncle (the aforementioned “mad scientist,” although that description isn’t completely accurate) want to train Hannah to be able to control her abilities. Except, she doesn’t have them, right? That’s Violet. They claim that Hannah is not a prisoner and can leave at any time, but it is hard to believe that given the circumstances. Besides, where would she go? Back to the earl’s house? Where she was definitely a prisoner?

I really liked the atmosphere of this book. Very Victorian, a bit spooky, a crumbling down house with a strange reputation, unusual characters, some of which are a little creepy. I kept reading because I needed to know more. I was really invested in Hannah’s story and very much wanted to know exactly who she was and where she really came from. There is a lot we don’t know about the other characters as well – Jack keeps referring to Mr. Langley as his uncle, but their relationship seems a bit more complicated than that. We don’t learn everything in this first book, of course, but this book sets up a lot of potential plots, including a villain with similar abilities with fire, who is desperate and a little mad, and wants to get Hannah at all costs.

Overall, this book was a really fun read. Definitely continuing on with this series!

GoodReads rating: 4 stars