THIS POISON HEART by KALYNN BAYRON
A REVIEW by ALEXA DUNCAN
Welcome back to the review column, everyone! Apologies for the hiatus (I actually used my time off!), but now we’re back with This Poison Heart by Kalynn Bayron. A brand new YA contemporary fantasy duology, This Poison Heart is about Briseis Greene, a girl who can bend plants to her will and grow them with a single touch. After learning she’s inheriting an isolated estate in the middle of the woods hours from her home in Brooklyn, Briseis and her moms move to Rhinebeck, New York in the hopes of starting a new life. As quaint as Rhinebeck is, not all is what it seems. The house Briseis inherits once belonged to her biological mother, Selene, and her aunt, Circe. They’d been tending to a garden on the property for generations, and this garden may hold the key to changing Briseis’s life forever.
When I read Bayron’s debut novel, Cinderella is Dead, I wasn’t overly impressed. I liked it well enough, but that was about it. I liked her writing enough to want to read Thi
s Poison Heart, however, and I’m glad I did. I really enjoyed this book. Bayron’s writing is easy and accessible, and the lush descriptions of the garden made me want one of my own (kinda, I don’t have any experience with plants). I loved the setting of Rhinebeck and I especially loved Bri’s moms. Their relationship is wonderful and they support Bri no matter what. The secondary characters are a little less interesting. Karter, Bri’s new friend, is fine. Marie, her love interest, kind of comes out of nowhere. There’s very little buildup between them, which again is understandable that this book is less about the romance and more about family.
The hidden legacies and small town settings, combined with the mysterious love interest and contemporary timeframe made this book feel like it could have been published in 2008, during the golden days of paranormal fantasy in YA. This is not a bad thing at all and is in fact one of the things I love most about this book. It brought to me a deep sense of nostalgia and I really enjoyed it. I will say that much of this book felt like setup for the next one (This Wicked Fate), but when the setup is as fun as this, I don’t overly mind it.
You can check out This Poison Heart at the Argenta Library today!