Looking Glass Sound: from the bestselling and award winning author of The Last House on Needless Street

Product Information

This multifaceted story is many things — a coming-of-age saga, a true-crime murder mystery, a tragic love story, and a tale of betrayal — with many moving pieces and a seemingly endless array of twists.

Looking Glass Sound by Catriona Ward - The Eloquent Page Looking Glass Sound by Catriona Ward - The Eloquent Page

I received an ARE of Looking Glass Sound from Tor/Nightfire in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating. Can you please turn down the volume on that thing? Nearly every sentence is faultless, gutting and precise. Come for the family secrets but stay for the humanity, tenderness, and empathy that are so central to Ward’s storytelling. This book will truly haunt you long after you read it." That’s all I’m going to say about the plot. With Ward’s books it’s always best to go in as blind as possible, and honestly, even if I tried to explain it further, I’d end up as confused as you! That confusion is part of why I love Ward’s books so much. You really have to pay attention to every detail, because things change on a dime continually keeping you so off-kilter that you don’t know which end is up! CATRIONA WARD was born in Washington, DC and grew up in the United States, Kenya, Madagascar, Yemen, and Morocco. She read English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford and is a graduate of the Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia. Her fourth novel, the gothic thriller Sundial (2022 - Viper, Tor Nightfire) was Observer Thriller of the Month and a USA Today, CNN and Apple Books selection for best new fiction. Stephen King called Sundial ‘Authentically terrifying…. Do not miss this book.’Final Recommendation: I’m recommending this for readers that enjoy going on a journey. A multi-layered storytelling experience with characters you can invest in. Original, unexpected, and reads like a dark thriller but leans into some horror vibes too. This isn’t a thriller with thin, easy-to-digest plotting. It’s complicated. It has probably ruined me for all thrillers to come because I dove into a popular new thriller right after finishing LOOKING GLASS SOUND and was immediately put off. So that’s my big blurb/takeaway: Catriona Ward has just leveled-up to Gillian Flynn status for me. There, I said it. Unbelievably good.... so clever, so haunting and melancholic. It's so beautiful, so dark, and so vivid." So here's the deal.... I'm sitting here in an airport as I write this review. I'm dead tired from losing sleep last night trying to blow through this..... 😩

Looking Glass Sound by Catriona Ward - Lightspeed Book Review: Looking Glass Sound by Catriona Ward - Lightspeed

Also, there seemed to be 3 stories being told intermittently that didn't feel at all relative to each other. I enjoyed them somewhat separately but struggle to see why they're in the same book. The Daggerman, the throuple between friends, and the book being stolen were all wildly different tones and didn't seem to mesh well together at all. But when Pearl is introduced, things get confusing. Pearl is clearly connected to Harper and Wilder, but it takes a while before the whys and hows are explained. The story contains no less than five different books: The Dagger Man of Whistler Bay (written by Wilder), The Sound and the Dagger (written by Sky), Skye (Wilder’s second book), the “fictional” Pearl (written by Skye), and finally, Looking Glass Sound (written by Pearl). The characters take on various personas and seem to appear in each other’s stories, and keeping them straight isn’t easy—Wilder/Wiley, Harper/Helen, Nat/Nate, Sky/Skye/Skander—some are real and some aren’t. To confuse things even more, another character named Grace makes an appearance late in the story, and again, she’s connected to the others in some interesting ways. For me, one of the highlights was the different types of relationships explored and the characters were all so well done. I did listen to the audiobook and recommend that format as the narration style fit the characters fantastically.

Popular This Week

The dread rises like a saltwater tide in a claustrophobic cave. Looking Glass Sound is a mesmerizing and haunting performance of a novel.” Finally, we are introduced to Pearl, the daughter of a woman named Rebecca who supposedly drowned a decade earlier in the bay. Pearl is also a writer and is tangled up with Wilder, Harper and Nat, although to explain how would be a spoiler. Unfortunately, it didn't really work for me. I was engaged at first and then the story turned into a weird fever dream. The reader isn't sure what is real and what isn't. Problem is, that for me? I didn't care what happened to any of these people. Hmm, is Looking Glass Sound a horror novel? I’ve been thinking about this a lot and the best response I can give is “Maybe”. There are certainly horrific moments. Wilder’s fragile mental state constantly erodes as the plot unfolds. Are the horrors he is experiencing genuine or the figment of an already damaged psyche? Again, I suspect this is an element of the novel that will be open to interpretation by every reader. If this is horror then it does fall firmly into the psychological category. If nothing else this is a novel about the monster we create for ourselves.