Today I’m joining the blog tour for Small Fires. My review is written with thanks to the team at Orenda Books for inviting me on the tour and for my copy of the book.

Blurb:

Evil runs through this cursed island
And these wicked sisters are about to make it burn…
When sisters Lily and Della Pedley are persecuted for the shocking murder of their parents, they flee from their home in Cornwall to a remote and unnamed island in Scotland – an island known for its strange happenings, but far away from the whispers and prying eyes of strangers.
Lily is terrified of what her sister will might do next, and she soon realises that they have arrived at a place where nothing is as it seems. A bitterness runs through the land like poison, and the stories told by the islanders seem to be far more than folklore.
Della settles in too easily, the island folk drawn to her strangeness, but Lily is plagued by odd and unsettling dreams, and as an annual festival draws nigh, she discovers that she has far more to fear than she could ever have imagined. Or does she…?
Chilling, atmospheric and utterly hypnotic, Small Fires is a contemporary gothic novel that examines possession, generational trauma, female rage, and the perilous bonds of family – an unsettling reminder that the stories we tell can be deadly…
Midsommar meets Midnight Mass in a folk horror, modern gothic masterpiece.

Review:

A few years ago, So Pretty became my book of the year, so I was so excited to see what Ronnie Turner would offer us next. Small Fires is brilliantly written, and it’s one of those wonderful novels that defies genre – it’s part crime, part supernatural and part horror and all the aspects of it work really well together.

Ronnie Turner is such an amazingly talented writer and her craft has developed with each novel she has written. The story of Small Fires itself is quite slow burning in terms of action, although the short chapters make it quite easy to fall into the “one more chapter before I go to bed” trap.  The creepy, foreboding and mysterious atmosphere is relentless and I love how the author manages to maintain this right until the end.

The characters in Small Fires are incredibly well drawn. The chapters are mostly from the viewpoint of Lily and Silas, and this gives us brilliant insight into their lives and thoughts and feelings. It’s also interesting to see one part of the story from two different perspectives.

It’s difficult to say much more without giving away spoilers, but it’s fair to say I was totally mesmerised by this novel and, once more, I’m eagerly awaiting more of Ronnie Turner’s stories.

Small Fires is available from Amazon.

You can follow the rest of the blog tour here: