Speed Reviews: The Veil by Rachel Harris & How it Ends by Rachel Howzell Hall

I’m back with two more shorts from the Audible Plus catalogue. Like the Facts of Life theme song, ‘you take the good (which I posted Tuesday), you take the bad (which is what we have here today)’. In this round, we have a ghostly romance, The Veil by Rachel Harris, and an avenging thriller, How it Ends by Rachel Howzell Hall.

Title: The Veil

Author: Rachel Harris

Narrator: Louisa Krause

Length: 47 minutes

Source: Audible Plus

Rating: .5 Cup 

Sally has recently left an unfulfilling job to volunteer at a living history museum, where she is assigned to the Death House. Every day, she dons Victorian mourning garb and describes traditional funeral services to tourists. It sounds depressing as hell, but for Sally, it’s less depressing than her tepid marriage to her childhood sweetheart.

This becomes all too clear when she accidentally travels through time and space to a liminal world where the ghosts of the living history museum haunt its grounds. There, she meets and falls hard for Victorian-era pretty boy Nathaniel. Their heady, romantic encounters douse Sally in the sad reality that her marriage is anything but and leave her tempted to join Nathaniel permanently in his realm.

Is Sally’s marriage literally a fate worse than death, or is there another way altogether?

 Sally works in the ‘Death House’ in a living history museum where she talks about Victorian funeral and mourning customs. One day, she goes to sleep in a Victorian Herse and wakes up to find Nathaniel—a Victorian-era ghost—she seems to prefer over her living high-school sweetheart who is now her husband. Now she has to choose between her tepid marriage or her ghostly beau.

Loved the premise: a living history museum worker time travels, sort of, and falls in love with the ghost of the Victorian era man that lived there. Hated the book. It was a waste of 47 minutes, thank goodness it was an Audible Plus freebie. I don’t know why so many people are raving about this short story. Not only was Sally the whiniest character, the plot was a waste of time.

This was a poorly executed mash-up of Emily Dickinson’s poem Because I Could Not Stop for Death. 

Title: How It Ends

Author: Rachel Howzell Hall

Narrator: Joniece Abbott-Pratt

Length: 2 hrs and 32 mins

 Source: Audible Plus

Rating: 1 Cup

Marti Greenwood has just moved into a brand-new home after a bitter divorce from her husband Emery, and while she’s still not quite done with him—of course, some of her most cherished possessions are nowhere to be found once she unpacks her things—a fresh start in a beautiful LA neighborhood is exactly what she needs.

But days after her arrival, Marti is attacked in her home. She's found shaken and beaten, and her neighbors immediately call the police. She never saw the face of her attacker, so there is little to go on as detectives open an investigation—but Marti will do whatever it takes to find her assailant.

Not only is Marti going through a divorce, she’s just been attacked in her new home. While she’s terrified, there’s little she can do to help the police find her attacker because she never saw his face. Still she’s determined to catch the person who did this to her.

Another book that started well, had amazing potential, but fell flat. Not only was the character inconsistent (one minute Marti was unable to move from fear then the next she was ready to be her own personal avenger) but the ending was absurd.

You know when you’re taking a creative writing course at uni and the professor gives you 30 minutes to come up with a short story and things are going well until you look at the clock and realize you’re coming up on the 30-minute mark and you’re a long way from the ending so instead of tying things up in a nice bow you crumple up the wrapping paper, hoping the one piece of tape holds the entire thing together.  Well, that was this ending. 

Have any of your recent reads not lived up to their potential?