The Place of Sapphires, by Florence Engel Randall

The Place of Sapphires begins in a verrrryyyyy Rebecca-ish fashion:

Someone was whispering, “Gabrielle, Gabrielle,” saying my name over and over again, and the voice began my dream. For I was dreaming. I knew I was dreaming the way I knew I was sleeping in a strange bed in a room that was not my own, the way I knew that the roof above had never sheltered me before.

I was going to stop right there, but suddenly I feel the need to share MORE, possibly because now I want to re-read the whole thing?? (I might also buy a personal copy??):

The room changed and I changed with it, my identity dissolving as if I, Gabrielle Anne Thatcher, age nineteen, made of flesh and bone and sinew, had no more existence. Another took my place, another whose name was Alarice, although this she didn’t tell me. Her eyes and hair and walk were different from mine, she being small as I was tall, fair as I was dark, and yet at this moment in space and time we were as one.

“This is my room,” Alarice said.

“This is my room,” I echoed obediently, her voice, my voice, her thoughts belonging to me. And because this was so, I knew that the dream I dreamt was no longer mine to dream, just as my name was no longer mine to claim. I was not Gabrielle. I was Alarice and this was my room.

I MEAN. That’s kind of a lot to unleash on a reader in LITERALLY the first two pages.

And I mean that in a good way.

So. While Gabrielle recovers from the car accident that landed her in the hospital and killed both of her parents, she and her older sister Elizabeth—who, Gabrielle tells us, was the only one to walk away from the accident unscathed even though she was driving—are staying in a beautiful old house near the ocean.

The house has a history, though—and it’s enough of a history that Elizabeth has zero luck hiring locals to help with the cooking and housekeeping and maintenance.

Paperback: The Place of Sapphires, by Florence Engel Randall — Paperback: *The Place of Sapphires*, by Florence Engel Randall

And the locals aren’t being silly or superstitious, they’re actually being SMART… because while the house has been uninhabited for decades, it’s not remotely empty.

The Place of Sapphires is, as you’ve likely gathered from the cover art, a 60s-era Gothic.

It reminded me again and again of Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle—but, like, through a V.C. Andrews filter, maybe?

There’s the complex relationship between sisters like in the Jackson, but it BRINGS the melodrama. It’s more restrained than V.C. Andrews, though, and the prose stylings are—how do I put this?—better.

It also reminded me a bit of the movie I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, but in more of a gut-level way that I think I’d have to talk out with someone to get a handle on. (SO IF YOU’VE READ THIS BOOK AND WATCHED THAT MOVIE, LET ME KNOW!!)

Anyway!

In The Place of Sapphires, we’ve got: