Score: 3.5 Bookmarks

I read The Ancestor by Danielle Trussoni, as part of a buddy read this month. While I was super excited about the premise of the book it fell short for me in execution.

Our leading lady, Alberta Monte (Bert for short) is going through a tumultuous time in her life when she finds out that she’s inherited an old gothic castle in the Italian Alps, along with a title, and potentially some money. She goes to check it all out, and finds that it’s certainly no fairytale…at least not the Disney variety. But it’s only after she has been at the castle for a while that she discovers the responsibilities she has really inherited, and that she can’t and won’t be going back to her old life.

Sounds pretty great right? I certainly thought so. But the main ‘twist’ of this book becomes obvious quite early on, and then the author spends the rest of the time just spelling it out, which seemed unnecessary. I also had quite a lot of problems with the behavior (and sometimes lack of action) of our main character. She just let everything happen to her, in some cases some truly horrific things, and didn’t react in a way you would expect any normal person to. Because of this lack of reaction, I felt like quite a few of these events (which I wish I could tell you about but really can’t without spoilers) were superfluous to the story. There were also so many mundane things overexplained, but quite major events were glossed over, so the book felt really off-kilter to me.

I really enjoy learning about evolution and hereditary traits but I felt this book was a little light on believability and any sort of historical accuracy. The book is only 368 pages but it felt much longer at times.

Perhaps if I hadn’t just read two outstanding horror books back-to-back before this one my expectations wouldn’t have been quite as high. But while I enjoyed parts of this one, I really wanted more from the story. I still think it had so much potential, it just didn’t quite make it.

Trigger warnings: infertility, pregnancy loss, emotional and physical abuse, violence.

Synopsis:

A bewitching gothic novel of suspense that plunges readers into a world of dark family secrets, the mysteries of human genetics, and the burden of family inheritance.

It feels like a fairy tale when Alberta ”Bert” Monte receives a letter addressed to “Countess Alberta Montebianco” at her Hudson Valley, New York, home that claims she’s inherited a noble title, money, and a castle in Italy. While Bert is more than a little skeptical, the mystery of her aristocratic family’s past, and the chance to escape her stressful life for a luxury holiday in Italy, is too good to pass up.

At first, her inheritance seems like a dream come true: a champagne-drenched trip on a private jet to Turin, Italy; lawyers with lists of artwork and jewels bequeathed to Bert; a helicopter ride to an ancestral castle nestled in the Italian Alps below Mont Blanc; a portrait gallery of ancestors Bert never knew existed; and a cellar of expensive vintage wine for Bert to drink.

But her ancestry has a dark side, and Bert soon learns that her family history is particularly complicated. As Bert begins to unravel the Montebianco secrets, she begins to realize her true inheritance lies not in a legacy of ancestral treasures, but in her very genes.