Affiliate links can be found within this post. If you need additional information, please see the disclaimer.
I voluntarily reviewed a complimentary copy of this book which I received from the author. All views expressed are only my honest opinion.
Once Upon A Book Club
Have you ever heard of Once Upon A Book Club? It’s this really neat subscription box where you get the book and it comes with WRAPPED gifts that you open along with the story as it unfolds. Other book boxes come with bookish merch as well, but this one is different because it really immerses you in the book you’re reading.
Castle of Shadows Book Box
I recently got to enjoy the “Castle of Shadows” book box that featured “In The Lonely Hours” by Shannon Morgan (review is below). It came with three wrapped gifts that went perfectly with this story! See the video below for the unboxing and throughout my review you can see the gifts that were inside the box!
MY REVIEW:
Genre | Tropes: Horror, Mystery, Gothic, Historical Fiction
Rating: 5 out of 5 ⭐
What an amazing story! Shannon Morgan really drives home those ancestral family dynamics that influence relationships within families. Mother to daughter and on through the lines of women.
First off, the haunted castle was pretty amazing with all of its lingering ghosts interacting with Edie and her daughter Neve. I was impressed with how well Morgan so easily introduces actual ghosts into the setting and the characters are, for the most part, pretty calm about it all.
But the repeating patterns of mother-daughter relationships was the core of this story. The Maundrell family does not have a pretty history and the late Lady Elizabeth was the progenitor of the horror that currently haunts the family estate.
The story stirs around a family heirloom called The Maundrell Red, essentially a prized ruby that gets passed down through the family. The matriarch currently has possession of it and uses it as leverage over everyone in her house. But she also is a cruel woman to everyone around her. Her relationship with her daughter Alice was of most interest, because it’s the most important dynamic throughout the book. We open into the first chapter with a look back at them together as Lady Elizabeth is an old woman dying and Alice is there with her torturing her on her deathbed.
As the story goes on, you get a fuller picture of what drove Alice to despise her mother so much and how it all connects to the present-day characters of Edie and Neve.
Another element of this story that I loved was the character of Mungo. He is one of the family members from Lady Elizabeth’s late son that died and would have been an heir to the family but he was born autistic. In the story he’s a grown man in his twenties but has all those childlike qualities that you’d expect. He is the bright spot of the Maundrell household with his adorable antics and deep care for those he loves, especially his cousin Lottie. Lottie is the one in this house that always makes sure Mungo is taken care of and looked after. Their relationship was paramount to this story and really created a ray of hope in all the darkness. Especially considering that throughout this book he is subjected to medical treatments of electrical shock to try and “cure him”. Keep in mind this plot takes place back in the 60’s, but this was not uncommon of people’s beliefs to think they could “shock” these things out of people.
An all around fantastic read and representation of Scottish lore, family dynamics, and how past pains can be healed by future generations.
GET IT HERE:
In a bewitchingly melancholy, thrillingly modern ghost story for readers of Eve Chase, Megan Shepherd, and Lisa Jewell, the new inhabitants of a centuries-old castle perched on a remote island in northwest Scotland must confront its tragic and terrifying history…
On a small island in a remote corner of northwest Scotland lies Maundrell castle, owned by its wealthy namesake family for centuries—until now. Edwina Nunn is shocked to learn a relative she never heard of has bequeathed the castle and its land to her. What awaits Edie and her teenage daughter, Neve, is even more startling, for the castle is home to a multitude of ghosts.
Yet there’s a strange beauty in the austere architecture and the eerie, bloody waters of Loch na Scáthanna, the Lake of Shadows. Beguiled by a frightened ghost who gazes longingly out of the castle’s windows, Edie and Neve are drawn to the legends shrouding the island and the mystery of the Maundrell Red—a priceless diamond that disappeared decades before.
Is the gem really cursed, and the cause of the family tragedies that have all occurred on Samhain—Scottish Halloween? As Samhain approaches once more, Edie and Neve race to peel back the dark secrets entwining the living and the dead—a twisted story of bitter cruelty and hidden love—or they will become another Maundrell tragedy trapped in the lonely hours . . .
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shannon Morgan
Shannon has had a nomadic past involving, but not limited to, nearly being shot in Kashmir, playing a marathon, ten-hour game of backgammon on the side of the road in Turkey, getting horribly sea-sick off the coast of Madagascar, and milking a camel in the Sahara Desert.
More recently, she moved from Africa with her husband and their four boys to the windswept moors of western England, where she gives in daily to her obsession to write. If not writing or reading, she will be collecting a worrying number of unusual and rather macabre plants, many of them poisonous as they tend to produce the most interestingly weird flowers.
Looking for book recs…
Adventures in Literature 
Leave a comment