Book Review

Thank you, Atria Books, for the gifted copy of The Cloisters {partner}

Genre: Mystery
Trope: Dark Academia
Format: 📖
Pub Date: 11.1.2022
Star Rating: ☆☆☆

Summary:

“When Ann Stilwell arrives in New York City, she expects to spend her summer working as a curatorial associate at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Instead, she finds herself assigned to The Cloisters, a gothic museum and garden renowned for its medieval art collection and its group of enigmatic researchers studying the history of divination.

Desperate to escape her painful past, Ann is happy to indulge the researchers’ more outlandish theories about the history of fortune telling. But what begins as academic curiosity quickly turns into obsession when Ann discovers a hidden 15th-century deck of tarot cards that might hold the key to predicting the future. When the dangerous game of power, seduction, and ambition at The Cloisters turns deadly, Ann becomes locked in a race for answers as the line between the arcane and the modern blurs.”

Review:

“It was then I realized how thin the light is that separates what we know as fate and what we think of as choice – just an interpretation. Nothing more.”

Y’all, I realllllly wanted to love The Cloisters, I can’t begin to tell you how excited I was when this dropped on my front step, but it just didn’t do anything for me. The first 30% was interesting; it had me questioning the characters’ motives and interests in the world of divination.

Here are a few of the things that didn’t work for me:

There were several occasions when I felt like I was reading straight from a textbook – the writing style needed to fit what I’d become accustomed to from the author, but it didn’t. The book was all over the place. Yes, the different storylines within the novel came together in the end, making a little more sense (not much), but aspects of the story were unnecessary and caused the book to drag. Because of this, I kept finding reasons to be distracted from the book and uninterested in resuming reading.

🗽 Dark Academia, New York City setting
🤩 Gorgeous cover
🔁 Repetitive
🤷🏽‍♀️ Almost had a YA vibe?
✨ Debut novel
👎🏼 Unlikable characters

Please take my review with a grain of salt as I am only one review (and reviews for this book have been all over the place), and I certainly don’t want to prevent anyone from picking this one up to read. The Cloisters is the author’s debut novel, and I am interested in what she writes next because she has a lot of potential.

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BOOK INFO
Format: 320 pages, hardback
Published: November 2022
ISBN 9781668004401 (ISBN10: 1668004402)