The Whispering Muse - Laura Purcell
I received a review copy of this book for free via NetGalley.
Laura Purcell's The Whispering Muse is a very frustrating book. Everything about the pitch appealed to me - theatrical curses, haunted items, death and deceit in the Victorian theatre. Sign me up immediately. The opening chapter gripped me immediately, giving us a character down on her luck reluctantly taking a job spying on an up-and-coming starlet in order to provide for her family, and I was ready to settle in for a roller coaster of Gothic mystery and weird magic.
Unfortunately the first chapter is by far the best part of the novel, and the rest falls off fast. The main character of Jennifer is impossible to like. She veers wildly in tone, from unsure and servile one minute to catty, confident, and brash the next - which could be a good thing, except the cattiness is always directed at people who have the power to end her employment and ruin her life in a heartbeat, directly at odds with the central tension that she really, really needs this job in order to survive. Her character is never developed in any meaningful way, and despite spending the entire 300+ pages with her I never felt like we got to know anything about her.
The relationships she forms are similarly flat and unbelievable. She goes from hating Lilith - calling her a "hussy" and doing everything in her power to destroy this woman who's never actually done anything wrong to her in Act I - to being her best friend by the middle of Act 2, and we never really see any indication of how that relationship develops. I never believed it for a second, and unfortunately it's this relationship that Purcell builds the emotional core of the novel around. Because I never believed this relationship, the ending completely fails to resonate in any meaningful way. The same is true of Jennifer's relationship with scene painter Oliver, which seems to blossom entirely off screen and goes from acquaintances to "we're literally married" without any real warning or buildup.
I say the novel is frustrating because on a surface level there's a lot to like here. The cursed watch and the mythology of Melpomene is compelling, the early scene showing a famous actor dying during a performance of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus is gruesome and filled me with a desire to know what was happening, and I could get lost in a world of gaslit Gothic theatre. All the ingredients for something really special are here, but it just never gets off the ground and stumbles its way to an ending that wants to be dramatic and filled with meaning but never earns it.