Book Review | This Poison Heart #20booksofsummer23

Kicking off my summer reading challenge with an amazing book.

This Poison Heart
Kalynn Bayron

Briseis has a gift: she can grow plants from tiny seeds to rich blooms with a single touch.

When Briseis’s aunt dies and wills her a dilapidated estate in rural New York, Bri and her parents decide to leave Brooklyn behind for the summer. Hopefully there, surrounded by plants and flowers, Bri will finally learn to control her gift. But their new home is sinister in ways they could never have imagined–it comes with a specific set of instructions, an old-school apothecary, and a walled garden filled with the deadliest botanicals in the world that can only be entered by those who share Bri’s unique family lineage.

When strangers begin to arrive on their doorstep, asking for tinctures and elixirs, Bri learns she has a surprising talent for creating them. One of the visitors is Marie, a mysterious young woman who Bri befriends, only to find that Marie is keeping dark secrets about the history of the estate and its surrounding community. There is more to Bri’s sudden inheritance than she could have imagined, and she is determined to uncover it . . . until a nefarious group comes after her in search of a rare and dangerous immortality elixir. Up against a centuries-old curse and the deadliest plant on earth, Bri must harness her gift to protect herself and her family.

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After reading Cinderella Is Dead during last year’s challenge I felt suddenly drawn to picking up this book because I knew it would be a great way to kick off this year’s challenge and I have been looking forward to reading it for such a long time. I was certainly not disappointed, I didn’t read too much into it before picking it up so I actually found it pretty surprising, there was a lot more to the story than I was expecting.

The premise was amazing it starts with Bri having a gift, plants come alive around her and she can help them grow but as the story progresses different elements start to emerge and suddenly we are delving into Greek mythology and uncovering family secrets and involved in an ancient feud which I loved.

The blend of characters and stories from Greek mythology that most will have heard of with an entirely new story was brilliant, I really enjoyed these stories coming to life in a different way and I felt like I was discovering more about them. The research that must have been done for this feels like it would have been a lot but the author has made it seem effortless, I found out so much without feeling like it was being dumped on me.

I did feel like the pacing wasn’t quite right in places, the story takes its time in the beginning and then oscillates between a fast and slower pace in the middle but as Briseis starts to realise the danger she is in it almost felt a little rushed. This was probably not helped by the fact that I was hooked and wanted to know what was going to happen next but the back-and-forth didn’t give me as smooth a reading experience as I expected.

Loved the characters in this book, even the ones that cause all the damage and pain are so well created. Bri is an interesting character I liked that whilst her gift meant that she had some trust issues and couldn’t form too many meaningful relationships, that she was accepting of it and still experimenting with what she could do and that her moms were both really supportive of that. I loved the relationship between her moms as well, they definitely felt like a team and you could really feel the love between them. Also, it was great that they were both featured so heavily in the book sometimes in YA the parents disappear but they are very involved which I loved.

I enjoyed the budding romance between Bri and Marie and that Marie has a mysterious quality about her, I maybe wish it had been a little more prolonged, a little more will they won’t they considering she is keeping a few secrets of her own but that’s just a personal preference. A bit of a side note, I could be in the minority with this but I like that the author didn’t feel the need to label the sexuality of her characters, it just made it feel so much more authentic for this story that it came out naturally in conversation.

This Poison Heart is a brilliant book full of wonderfully unexpected elements and fantastic characters, all I can say is I am glad I have the second book in this series waiting to go because after that cliffhanger ending I am desperate to get into it.