This one was offered to me and it sounded interesting. Love a spooky haunted house story every now and then!
So thanks to the author, as well as St. Martin’s Press via NetGalley for the review copy!
Single mother Elodie’s life has become a fairy tale. She’s met Bren, equal parts Golden-retriever-devoted and sinfully handsome. He’s whisked her and her autistic son, Jude, to the crumbling family house he’s renovating. She has a new husband, a new house, and a new baby on the way. Everything is perfect.
Until Jude claims he can hear voices in the walls. He says their renovations are “hurting” the house. Even Elodie can’t ignore it—something strange is going on.
The question is, Is it with the house, or with her son?
And what is Elodie hiding?
You Did Nothing Wrong is the story of Elodie and her son Jude who recently moved to he US from Australia after marrying Bren, who lives in a big old house that was left to him by his parents and he is slowly fixing it up. Jude keeps saying that he can hear the house whispering and that the house does not like what Bren is doing to it as he makes repairs and renovates. Strange things certainly are afoot, but it’s more than the house that is haunted here.
So… I had a hard time with this one at first, I will admit. Mainly because uh… this story is my nightmare. Not just the house whispering but Jude is, like many autistic children (me included, I’m sure… sorry, mom) prone to meltdowns that have varying levels of intensity. He bites, hits, screams, breaks things, and I was just like nope. Nope… nope nope nope nope. No thank you.
The book was so beautifully written, with fantastic prose and it was so easy to just put myself in this story. It was hard to put it down at times, but I found myself needing to. I can’t stress enough how easy it was to get immersed in this book. Imagine you find your nightmare fuel, and now imagine it is gorgeous and descriptive and your nightmare fuel, lol…
You Did Nothing Wrong goes into Elodie’s family history, of her parents losing their youngest son and basically completely shutting down. Her parents begin basically ignoring her (along with pretty much everything else) and Elodie, traumatized and forgotten teenager makes… decisions. Wow… those sure were some choices. I absolutely don’t understand much of the choices that most of the characters here made, but trauma does all kinds of weird things to people, and Elodie was more than a bit traumatized by… I mean her whole life, really.
Dawn has broken the sky with a sharp slice, a bruised persimmon glow to the horizon that feels like condemnation.
There were times in the first half of the story where I wasn’t quite sure that I really wanted to keep on going with it, because again, while I found it beautiful I wasn’t finding a lot of payoff in the story to account for the increasing levels of weirdness and gore. I am however so very glad that I stuck with it, because the last third of this book was like a rollercoaster of emotions and plot twists. I believe I actually said ‘Oh, shit.’ out loud at a few points, which is not something that I typically do even once, never mind multiple times. So take that as you will.
It’s hard to rate this one because like I said, I found myself setting it aside a lot in the beginning. In the end though, I’m very glad that I stuck with it. The breaks I took were actually really worth it and I think that I enjoyed this story a lot more having let my brain rest between reading sessions than I would have if I had tried to force myself to read the entire thing in one sitting. I’m going to give this one a 4/5 stars because holy crap. This book is going to live rent free in my brain for a while.
superstardrifter 
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