Review: Little Eve

Little Eve by Catriona Ward
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I received both a print and audio ARC of this book via Netgalley, all opinions are my own.  This book was re-released on October 11, 2022 however it was previously published in 2019.  It has one several awards and I can see why.  It its very atmospheric and pretty dark.  I would recommend looking up trigger warnings before reading.  I didn't think it was particularly scary, but it is disturbing.  This definitely includes child abuse and what I would consider grooming, there is also animal harm and body harm.  Eve and her "siblings" are taken in by a man who kind of runs a cult that worships an entity of the sea, so there is also cult worship behavior.

This book was tough to listen to on audio because of the disjointed timeline.  I often found myself referring to the print ARC because I felt like I missed something.  The storyline is confusing because of the way the timeline jumps around to keep the reader in the dark prior to the reveal.  I thought the reveal was creative and it took me a good bit of the book to figure out what was happening.  I did eventually figure out most of what was going on but the final reveal was actually pretty good.  This has some pretty decent twists and turns.  I thought the alternating POVs worked well with the alternating timeline and thought the author did a good job bringing everything back together in the end to wrap things up. 

I thought the world building in this was great!  Ward's descriptions of Altnaharra and Eve's visions really put you into the setting.  This was also very atmospheric, if you enjoy gothic style horror/thriller novels this is a good one to pick up.  My only real complaint was the confusing nature of the timeline.  I found it really hard to keep track of what was happening alternating between Eve and Dinah's perspectives and the large jumps in time between the different chapters.  I don't think that would have been quite a big an issue had I read the book in print, but it was harder to keep track on audio.  I'm thankful I had both the audio and the print arcs to reference when reading so I could keep track of what was going on.  In the end I enjoyed this dark and twisty book.  I don't think this is going to be for everyone given the uncomfortable subject that unfolds as Eve grows up and more information regarding the murder of her family comes to light.  

Overall, I this is a good read if you are looking for a dark and twisty tale as we enter the spooky season.  

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