Review: The Manor of Dreams

The Manor of Dreams by Christina Li
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I wonder- did I get a different edition of this book than others did?  So many other readers loved it,  I am in the minority here!

Muddled

Disorganized

At times confusing

Overly drawn-out descriptions.

Sapphic sexual tension that added nothing to the story.

I don't know why I pushed myself so hard to finish this novel. But finish it I did!  If it had been a little worse, I would not have finished it. Kudos to those who loved it! The last few chapters of this book made it somewhat worthwhile. 

This book blends horror with family drama, or rather a saga, and so far, the family drama has won out over the horror, but it's as dull as all get out.  

This would have been, in my opinion, a better book had the author stuck to the modern-day setting and explored what happened to Vivian by searching the possessed house and digging a little deeper to uncover the truth about the husband and the deceased daughter.  Dealt less with the past and added more of the horror to it. 

Finding out more about Vivian while searching this haunted house would have been ideal. It might also have been better if we hadn't had to learn so much about Vivian and her career and all the minutia that went with it. 

*ARC supplied by the publisher Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster, the author, and NetGalley.

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DESCRIPTION: "Mexican Gothic meets Everything I Never Told You in Christina Li’s haunting novel about the secrets that lie in wait in the crumbling mansion of a former Hollywood starlet, and the intertwined fates of the two Chinese American families fighting to inherit it.

They say what you don’t know can’t hurt you. But silence can be deadly.

Vivian Yin is dead. The first Chinese actress to win an Oscar, the trailblazing ingénue rose to fame in the eighties, only to disappear from the spotlight at the height of her career and live out the rest of her life as a recluse.

Now her remaining family members are gathered for the reading of her will and her daughters expect to inherit their childhood Vivian’s grand, sprawling Southern California garden estate. But due to a last-minute change to the will, the house is passed on to another family instead—one that has suddenly returned after decades of estrangement.

In hopes of staking their claim, both families move into the mansion. Amidst the grief and paranoia of the families’ unhappy reunion, Vivian’s daughters race to piece together what happened in the last weeks of their mother’s life, only to realize they are being haunted by something much more sinister and vengeful than their regrets. After so many years of silence, will the families finally confront the painful truth about the last fateful summer they spent in the house, or will they cling to their secrets until it’s too late?

Told in dual timelines, spanning three generations, and brimming with romance, betrayal, ambition and sacrifice, The Manor of Dreams is a thrilling family gothic that examines the true cost of the American dream—and what happens when the roots we set down in this country turn to rot."