This is an odd book.
Maeve is an Irish lass at a Catholic private school. While having to clean out The Chokey (yup, they call the closet this), she finds an odd deck of tarot cards that she has an affinity with, and starts doing readings for all the girls at school. Except there's one extra card called "The Housekeeper" in there, and she's got a knife, and the card will magically show up in the deck even if Maeve takes it out.
Maeve dumped her best friend Lily for popularity reasons, and feels guilty about it. When people harass her into giving Lily a reading, it goes terribly, and much like in Home Alone, Lily soon disappears. Did Maeve make her disappear? Or was it The Housekeeper? What the hell is going on here? Maeve appears to be a witchy sort of girl, and this seems to tie in with a former student at the school decades ago as well. She comse to the conclusion that Lily was somehow magicked away, and plans on getting her back.
In other fun news, someone else who appears to be magically gifted on the dark side and a total bigot is getting people to join his creepy group, The Children of Brighid, and they start committing hate crimes.
Maeve also gets romantically involved with Lily's...presumably transgender/genderqueer/non-binary brother Rory, a.k.a. Roe. Their romance is very sweet and cute and fairly insta and cuddly, which I enjoyed. Though I admit I was totally confused as to how Roe appears to feel about gender (i.e. name change, women's clothing) vs. still going by male pronouns. Maeve pretty much calls him her boyfriend. I really, really expected Roe to change pronouns/officially go by something other than male and that felt HEAVILY foreshadowed, bit that never happened, which surprised me. I'm just another cisgender straight Karen so what do I know on this topic, I suppose. Others in the anything-but-straight community may have a more correct understanding/opinion on that one than me though. Maybe that's normal?
As for the ending, I'm not sure what's going on, exactly. The main conflict gets more or less resolved, but some definitely creepy stuff is left open, possibly for a sequel? I guess we'll see?
I'm not really sure what to make of this at all. Three and a half stars, I guess. Intriguing but a bit confusing.
Comments