This whole book irked my soul. There was a lot of things happening in this one and i just felt wholly unsatisfied by the never ending attempts to break the curse and the character of Jemma forgiving people for the crap that they did. I don’t know what the author was going on for in this one, but I think that it could have pushed more on the horror aspects of this one or gone full V.C. Andrews it would have worked better. There were some really good elements. It takes place in New Orleans (a city I love), you have an old Southern family that is creepy, a old creepy house, ghosts, a mysterious secret, and yet it didn’t really work. It felt like this book didn’t know what it wanted to be after a while and it just kept jumping around and around until you get to the ending. And I kept hoping the book would end and nope, there would just be more pages to go. I think that there were some interesting things in this book about those who passed back in the day and the legacy (or lack thereof) they have left for those that followed, but it felt at times that things were just not going to ever go as deep as they should have gone with the backstory we get in this one.
This Cursed House takes place in the U.S. in 1962 and follows 27 year old Jemma Barker as she leaves Chicago for a new position as a tutor for the Duchon family living in New Orleans. Jemma has a lot to get used to, first off the heat, but also why no one wants anything to do with the Duchon family and have warned her off of trying to live there. Jemma finds the Duchon family to be beautiful and intimidating, but there appears to be a reason why she was hired, and it was not to be a tutor, but as someone who can break a long standing curse.
Jemma was a doormat the entire book. And I was just sick of it about a quarter of the way through. It made no sense the choices she made after a while outside of the story commanded it. It didn’t help the other characters were not that well developed either. The Duchon family may as well have had a checklist of characters they were mimicking because that was how it read after a while. We also have some helpful Black characters who don’t do much but either tell Jemma something and or trying to hide something from the family. The flow of this book was awful. The first 25 percent of the book I was totally locked in, but it just felt like the author didn’t know what to do and just kept adding more and more things to the point that I just didn’t care anymore about Jemma finally figuring out the curse or anymore secrets. I felt like I was reading a book form or Drunken History or something and I just wanted it to end.
The setting of the house/grounds/etc. could have been scarier or darker. I found that the book was reading very repetitive after a while and I think that Sandeen could have played up the horror aspects way more than they did when you get to the curse/how it first started. I just wanted to feel some type of dread or something, and not just annoyance.
Eventually the book ends and it’s because everyone forgave each other and I maybe said blech a few times when I finished.
