Violet Holloway emerges from the hold of a coma asking for children who never existed, whose presence still lingers in a house they have never lived in. In a town where secrets are social currency and closed doors can only contain the whispers for so long, a string of unfortunate events become less than coincidental with each new revelation.

As an architect, Violet believes in the articulation of buildings; Orchard House has stories to tell beyond the curated facade of its exterior. Placed in the center of this mystery, finding the origin of the chaos is paramount. Before the body count piles up.

Spoiler-Free Plot

Wren. Lark. June. The Three flightless birds, trapped in the memories of a wounded mind. They haunt the rooms they would’ve belonged to, and the mother who cannot control the upwelling of resentment directed towards those mothers who fail their own children when she was never truly given the chance to be one to begin with.

To protect itself from further damage after injury, Violet Holloway’s mind concocts a mimic of the truth. Facts are veiled behind a dense fog so they can only be witnessed as edited versions of themselves. The person responsible for this obscurity plays the game, always one step ahead of everybody else. Their taunts expose the rot that everyone in town has worked tirelessly to keep hidden, at all cost. Violet must unveil the identity behind the shrouded villain to make sense of reality once more. The safety of her sanity relies on it.

My Take on A Catalog of Small Cruelties

Everything in this book is visceral. From start to finish, you can’t help but feel overcome by the gravity of everything happening inside the story, so much so that it seeps into the air around you, suffocating it with the weight of suspense. You can risk taking a breath when it seems the dangers have somewhat abated, but the deception lives in the numbers at the bottom of the page; they are a threat of more to come.

The author writes in riddles and aphorisms. Keeping your mind sharp becomes as much of a requirement as walking through the mystery with the characters.

Readers are invited into the fray when attention is called to the protagonist’s manner of speaking—our own thoughts copying Detective Velázquez’s demand, “You need to stop speaking in aphorisms at crime scenes”. It brings about a charming irony where the author is aware of Violet’s dramatic flair, which in turn makes us forgiving of its presence. Mentions of chapters and page numbers animates the book into a living thing we hold in our hands as we read. The lines that define sentience are blurred. The description of items is so vivid that they too are made into witnesses, forming a chorus that enhances the experience tenfold.

Although the setting we are placed in is only a narrow snapshot of a much larger region, Angela Grey portrays an affluent, mid-western suburb in a way where it wraps itself around the selected genre. We find ourselves inviting the hazy weather to surround us wherever we are, and whatever might lay in store for us within it. The fallacious memories of the smell of pines, tamaracks and boggy wetlands we may have never encountered before lingers in the back of our minds. We feel the coziness, the quaint beauty proportionally weighted against the rampant gossip and moral judgement, all born from small town familiarity. It demonstrates a masterful savoir faire to invoke a sense of belonging and longing for an often disregarded place.

Your mind will be haunted for a long while after you turn the final page. Although I’m still unsure about my feelings concerning the ending, I do know that the maelstrom of suspense stirred up by this book will not be forgotten for years to come.

Angela would be in good company in a room with peers like Gillian Flynn and Liane Moriarty. The only difference being, her stories are written in a different language entirely…one that rearranges and stages your feelings before you’ve had time enough to note the evidence of its effect. It’s a strange but exhilarating sensation to lose trust in your own instinct, surrendering them to fiction.

Age Rating

16 years and above

Content Warning

Child Abuse, Death, Medical Abuse, Murder, Violence.

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