The House Saphir by Marissa Meyer

The "Queen of Fairytale Retellings" is back! #1 New York Times bestselling author Marissa Meyer weaves the tale of Bluebeard as it's never been told before. This is a thrilling romantasy and murder mystery, perfect for fans Meyer's Cinder and Heartless.

Mallory Fontaine is a fraud. Though she comes from a long line of witches, the only magic she possesses is the ability to see ghosts, which is rarely as useful as one would think. She and her sister have maintained the family business, eking out a paltry living by selling bogus spells to gullible buyers and conducting tours of the infamous mansion where the first of the Saphir murders took place.

Mallory is a self-proclaimed expert on Count Bastien Saphir—otherwise known as Monsieur Le Bleu—who brutally killed three of his wives more than a century ago. But she never expected to meet Bastien's great-great grandson and heir to the Saphir estate. Armand is handsome, wealthy, and convinced that the Fontaine Sisters are as talented as they claim. The perfect mark. When he offers Mallory a large sum of money to rid his ancestral home of Le Bleu's ghost, she can’t resist. A paid vacation at Armand’s country manor? It’s practically a dream come true, never mind the ghosts of murdered wives and the monsters that are as common as household pests.

But when murder again comes to the House Saphir, Mallory finds herself at the center of the investigation—and she is almost certain the killer is mortal. If she has any hope of cashing in on the payment she was promised, she’ll have to solve the murder and banish the ghost, all while upholding the illusion of witchcraft.

But that all sounds relatively easy compared to her biggest challenge: learning to trust her heart. Especially when the person her heart wants the most might be a murderer himself.

Why I Picked It Up

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I really enjoy Marissa Meyer. Her Lunar Chronicles series, her debut, is so wholly original and establishes her as the queen of fractured fairytales in my mind. I get chills thinking about finishing that book for the first time in my 7th grade math class.

I've loved her other books too, like Renegades and Heartless. Her most recent series, Gilded, doesn't entirely do it for me, but still captures the aura, immersion, and plotting I seek when picking up a similar book from my shelf. Very few authors can trigger that whole-body escape for me.

In December, I apparently crave a book like that: cozy, vivid, well-constructed. So Meyer tackling a Bluebeard retelling? Sign me up.

About the Book

The plot focuses on two sisters, Mallory and Anais, who run a business giving ghost tours of the site of the first of the Bluebeard (La Bleu) murders. When they're about to be arrested as frauds, the heir to the fortune shows up and rescues Mallory in the nick of time with a proposition: as she can see ghosts, he needs her to rid their country property of the vengeful spirit of Le Bleu. The plot ultimately unfolds with the recognition that Le Bleu has unfinished business, that Mallory is still self-protective and slightly fraudulent, and that the heir himself has secrets he won't let go of.

Mallory, our main character, feels familiar. She's sharp in a way that feels a lot like Meyer's other protagonist from her Gilded series—which isn't bad, but did make me wish they'd felt more distinctive. Still, she's unabashedly self-protective and unafraid of lying to secure the future of her and her sister.

The beginning is absorbing yet punctuated with significant events. Mentally, I was reading it as a writer at points and filing away some of her strategies. She's undoubtedly good, as nothing feels abrupt. She's on a level like Suzanne Collins with The Hunger Games in that everything layers together so fluidly within her plots that you can sense mastery in the storytelling.

You don’t track transitions, and there are only one or two moments that I can tell are constructed for a specific purpose. (Maggie Stiefvater has a good rule I like, which is that the goal of a good story is to keep someone from slowing enough to notice picky bits like that.)

And then there's the plot, which ranges from chilly encounters with ghosts, fedora-tip type strangeness from strange encounters (which feels almost Alice in Wonderland-esque), and malevolent presences.

I read the first 200 pages in one setting, eyelids drooping and sleepy. I frequently had the disconcerting (delightful) sense of wanting to race to the end and not wanting it to be over, which is what I look for in the books I pick up when in this mood.

All in all, a delightful book. It reminds me some of Libba Bray's The Diviners and some of Erin A. Craig's House of Salt and Sorrows. I do think anyone who's read similar haunted house or vengeful ghost retellings will find the plotting rather obvious, but Meyer's skill keeps it firmly enjoyable.

The middle lagged for me, but the ending was exciting. Mallory and her sister were likable; the magic systems overlaid were fluid and logical, so the entire story felt well-supported. Bits are just whimsical enough for that fairytale feeling, whereas the subtle spookiness did have me jumping one night at the creaky old bones of my ceiling (i.e a squirrel running across a roof with very little insulation.)

Overall Thoughts

I'd definitely recommend this one on a cold winter night with a cup of hot tea. Especially if the fractured fairytale (or Meyer's adventures within) are new to you, the bones likely won't feel as familiar as they do to me.

And even having read rather similar stories before, Meyer really does command her pacing, plotting, transitions, etc. as the best of a subgenre. Her execution is so lovely that she's always on my auto-buy list at the bookstore without even knowing the plot.

Also: if you have a middle or high-schooler you're shopping for around now, buy them The Lunar Chronicles and they'll get hooked!

For fans of:

The Diviners by Libba Bray; Wither by Lauren DeStefano; Cinder by Marissa Meyer; The Monstrous Kind by Lydia Gregovic; etc.