The Animals at Lockwood Manor

By: Jane Healey

Narrated by: Sarah Lambie

A debut novel for fans of Sarah Perry and Kate Morton: when a young woman is tasked with safeguarding a natural history collection as it is spirited out of London during World War II, she discovers her new manor home is a place of secrets and terror instead of protection.

In August 1939, 30-year-old Hetty Cartwright arrives at Lockwood Manor to oversee a natural history museum collection whose contents have been taken out of London for safekeeping. She is unprepared for the scale of protecting her charges from party guests, wild animals, the elements, the tyrannical Major Lockwood and Luftwaffe bombs. Most of all, she is unprepared for the beautiful and haunted Lucy Lockwood.

For Lucy, who has spent much of her life cloistered at Lockwood suffering from bad nerves, the arrival of the museum brings with it new freedoms. But it also resurfaces memories of her late mother, and nightmares in which Lucy roams Lockwood hunting for something she has lost.

When the animals appear to move of their own accord, and exhibits go missing, they begin to wonder what exactly it is that they might need protection from. And as the disasters mount up, it is not only Hetty's future employment that is in danger, but her own sanity too. There's something, or someone, in the house. Someone stalking her through its darkened corridors...

©2020 Jane Healey (P)2020 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Immersive, satisfying, romantic, & it has:🐆🐘🦧🐀🐾🐭🦊🐰

This is an engaging historical fiction set in the British countryside during WWII. There is the mandatory ancient, crumbling, and foreboding manor house. Headed of course by an arrogant and sometimes sinister man, and his surly housekeeper. Also living there is his seemingly delicate daughter, and a director of the British Museum, who has taken up residence, along with the museum’s entire natural history mammal collection, for the duration of the war, to protect the collection from the blitz bombing of London.

Shenanigans of course ensue, as does an underlying mystery. But this is not an Agatha Christie people die one by one type of book, it’s more like Rebecca....there are glimmers of things sinister and mysterious happening in the background of a love story in the foreground.

That said this book offers a different take on this trope. But to explain it would be a spoiler. I will say I found the storyline very much held my interest, especially the various relationships, the details about the collection, and the general immersive atmosphere. It was an excellent escape and distraction from what’s going on in real life here in the states in the Spring of 2020.

The narration was also quite good. My sole criticism is that of the two female primary characters it took a few paragraphs sometimes to know which one was speaking. It would have helped greatly to have their specific chapters headed up with their names, instead of just launching into.....when I was a girl, etc, and having to wait until they mentioned the name of one of their family members or something so that you would realize....oh it’s Lucy that is speaking now.

If you are seeking something gothic and distracting give this one a try.