Not really sure what to make of this one and it seems a few other people have voiced the same opinion. I did listen to this as an audiobook and I think the narrator did a great job which helped to make this more engaging than it might have been otherwise. Unfortunately, I really did not like this book. Despite the beautiful prose, it was a slog to get through. The book is slow and I found myself bored several times throughout. A lot of mysterious and witchy things happen, but they never end up getting explained. I’m ok with a few things not being explained but the whole book and how it ended was just super vague. The reveal, if you can call it that, is simply implausible. I don’t like what the reveal suggested because it invalidates a lot of what the reader suspected was happening. And even with my theory of what happened I still have no idea what the hell actually happened. Just a lot of strange instances with no clear cut explanation or reasoning behind it. There is also an unreliable narrator, a single woman, approaching middle age, who has left teaching following an “incident”, some “mass hysteria” in the classroom. The reader learns more about this as the novel develops. She now does online work, writing essays and papers for people. She was educated at Dollar Academy in Scotland and at Cranleigh School, Surrey, and Oriel College, Oxford. Moving into a cottage on the remote estate of Hare House, she begins to explore her new home - a patchwork of hills, moorland and forest.

Sally Hinchcliffe's Hare House is a modern-day witch story, perfect for fans of Pine and The Loney. My first novel, OUT OF A CLEAR SKY, was published by Pan Macmillan in May 2008, and was selected as the May Book of the Month by Radio Five Live’s Book Panel. It also featured as a Book at Bedtime on Radio 4. Eerie and subtle . . . This deliciously chilly tale dodges the expected outcome and maintains a delicate balance between psychology and witchcraft right to its disturbing end * Guardian * We have an unnamed narrator; a woman whose teaching career came to an end after a seemingly innocuoGod, I just loved this book. I know it’s impossible, but I wish everything I read could make me feel like this: alive with excitement about what fiction can do, half-certain it was written specifically for me, and immediately desperate to read it all over again. The story is good. It's well paced and just spooky enough. I would have liked to gather more of a connection to our narrator, who we never learned the name of. In the first brisk days of autumn, a woman arrives in Scotland having left her job at an all-girls school in London in mysterious circumstances. Moving into a cottage on the remote estate of Hare House, she begins to explore her new home – a patchwork of hills, moorland and forest. But among the tiny roads, dykes and scattered houses, something more sinister lurks: local tales of witchcraft, clay figures and young men sent mad. I found Sally Hinchcliffe's debut novel 'Out of a Clear Sky' gloomy and depressing, but also (in its sinister way) quietly compelling. Her second novel is perhaps less successful. True, it contains some of the same beautiful evocations of landscape and wildlife that made her debut so memorable. I really enjoyed the Scottish setting, and the occasional oblique references to myths and fairytales (the mysterious lady with the dogs, for example).

It’s got a lot of interesting themes, including grief and madness, and several jump scares that I thought were well done.Since 1994 I have worked for the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in the IT department, developing databases to support its scientific work. In 2001 I took a two year sabbatical from Kew to work in Eswatini (then Swaziland) as a volunteer with Skillshare International. As anyone who has lived in the countryside will know, it is delusional to imagine, as Sally Hinchliffe’s middle-aged, female protagonist does in Hare House, that it harbours “a place of peace, where I might find refuge”. Rural communities seethe with as much intrigue as city offices and staff-rooms, and landscape is as menacing as cityscape. Striking up a friendship with her landlord and his younger sister, she begins to suspect that all might not be quite as it seems at Hare House. And as autumn turns to winter, and a heavy snowfall traps the inhabitants of the estate within its walls, tensions rise to fever pitch. Either way, it becomes clear that the dying hare on the road is a metaphor both for what is to come and what has been. Did our narrator control its fate, or was it controlling hers? This question of who’s the victim and who’s the perpetrator pertains to the two intertwined mysteries – one in the past and one in the present – that lie at heart of Hinchcliffe’s dark and absorbing second novel.

The locals keep to themselves, the village not easily accessible when the snow hits, an old estate house with what appears to be taxidermy gone mad on display for all to see, and a neighbour who perhaps has more secrets than Hare House. When a young woman arrives in a remote and far removed part of Scotland, looking to escape her troubled and shadowed past she may find that this place of peace and nature may not be as tranquil as she had hoped. Although, I'm not seeing the same gap in information that a few other reviewers have stated. I think it was made fairly clear what happened at the narrator's school and why she moved to Scotland. There's clearly something mysterious going on with the narrator, and having more focus on that might have answered some of those questions I was left with.The book is immersed in the landscape and its history and folklore and I couldn’t have written it anywhere else.” As we learn that our nameless narrator has fled London and her previous job at a private girls’ school in mysterious circumstances, we begin to wonder what made her sixth-form class of fresh, young girls fall down “like petals from a rose”. Who was the victim of this mass fainting? The seasoned teacher grown bitter as love turned sour, or the smirking teenage girl with a “high, light silver” laugh?

Hare House has been on my radar for a while and I was excited to be given an early copy of it to review. Unfortunately, it did not live up to my expectations. Described as “a folk horror tale on a Scottish estate,” the book was also a hit at the recent Wigtown Book Festival where Sally was a guest author. Overall, Hare House is an engaging read with elements of the Gothic and folk horror woven subtly throughout.

I didn’t sympathize with any of the main characters and the side characters were hard to tell apart. Too many plot points were never explained, and the book seemed to feed into stereotypes without challenging them in any way. I don’t need my books to promote good morals and I usually enjoy an unreliable narrator, but I at least was hoping she would be challenged on her extremely problematic views in some way by anyone at all in the text and she really wasn’t. But the novel is weak in terms of both characterisation and plot. None of the characters are sympathetic, and none have much psychological depth. The unnamed, unreliable narrator (two pet hatreds of mine) is both dull and creepy, and I object to the way that Hinchcliffe implies (through both her and Janet) that unmarried women above a certain age are unhinged. The male characters have little depth (though I quite liked Davey and the ghost of Rory), Cass is a shrill hysteric, and the other women are either poorly sketched out (Helen, Kirsty) or tedious (the malevolent Janet). By the end of the book I couldn't care less if all of them (Davey and perhaps Kirsty and Dougie excepted) had been devoured by a giant carnivorous hare. She said the region’s history of witch trials was the inspiration for her to write this spooky second novel called Hare House – which is gaining critical acclaim. Read More Related Articles The story is told by an unnamed protagonist who arrives on the remote estate of Hare House in Scotland having left her job at an all-girls school in London in mysterious circumstances. As the story develops it throws up so many questions. Why did the main protagonist leave her job? Why is Janet so strange? What happened to Rory? What is the meaning of the biblical reference? What is the significance of the hares? What is going on with Cass? Two and a half stars because at least it kept me reading till the end, but I can’t say I really enjoyed this book. It was billed as a modern gothic novel about an unnamed British woman who rents a cottage in Scotland after a mysterious incident causes her to lose her longtime teaching job. She meets the family who owns the grounds and shortly after her arrival, strange things start happening at the cottage and the main estate house. As the story goes on, you learn more about what made the woman lose her job as well as the mysterious past of the people who own the property. Sounds promising, right?