Book Review: "Black Rabbit Hall" by Eve Chase

So I picked up this book thinking that this was going to be a kind of haunted old Victorian house mystery. Which it isn't in the traditional sense, but the book still mostly worked for me.

The Altons are a happy family of 6 living in England in the 1960s. Successful dad, bubbly American mother and 4 close knit siblings - Amber, Toby, Barney and Kitty. They spend their holidays at crumbling, but genteel Black Rabbit Hall where they kind of run wild in a carefree way like you do in nature when you're a kid.Of course, nothing good lasts forever and the death of a family members set all of their lives on a dramatically different course. 

In the present time, Lorna and her fiancee are looking for a place to hold their wedding. Lorna has very strong memories of being in the area and visiting Black Rabbit Hall, even though they have a hard time locating it. When she is reunited with the house, she feels a strong attachment to the place that she can't quite explain but the creaky old lady who lives in the forlorn estate gives her the chance to stay a few days to get reacquainted with it. Lorna's time there provides her with questions she didn't even know that she had....and considerably more.

I can appreciate that the author let's us fill in our own thoughts during some of the gaps of time in the book but a lot of potentially really interesting moments fall in these "left out" sections and it left me wanting. It's not like it was a ridiculously long book and she needed to wrap it up. I felt like a reader left hanging in a couple of instances and I did not like the feelings.

I give this book an overall 3 stars. It's not really reinventing the wheel, it's kind of predictable but it's entertaining and the setting is interesting.