Please note this review contains reference to some of the events in this novel. Read with caution.
When she left behind her coastal village to attend the illustrious Marchmain Academy, Lacrimosa “Lark” Arriscane never planned to return home. Certainly not before securing the heavily coveted postgraduate curatorship at the city museum. On the cusp of achieving all she’s worked for, Lark is expelled from her boarding school for a violent incident and sent home. In a windswept cottage by the sea, Lark and her family have prayed for generations to Therion, the chthonic god who lords over the tides, the salt, and the woods bordering their lands. Upon her return, Lark learns that the salt mines that have afforded them wealth and security have run dry and her family is on the brink of financial ruin. The only way out is a bargain with Therion, their god, who promises to restore the mines in exchange for Lark’s hand in marriage. Against her family’s wishes, Lark agrees, but when the ritual goes wrong, Lark is left bound to a god and dragged in between the mortal and chthonic realm. Lark can no longer deny she needs help, but her only allies lie in Alastair and Camille Felimath, her former childhood friends and the family to whom the Arriscane’s owe a tremendous debt. Bound to a demon and drawn to her demise, Lark seeks to sever her bindings, but she may not survive the fate she was promised, nor the loves rending her heart in two.
Pulled in and weighted by a heavy tide, Lyndall Clipstone’s Tenderly, I Am Devoured is a reassuring ballad to the broken-hearted and anyone on the cusp of something strange and unknown. Rigged with brambles, salt, and sea foam, this perilous novel embodies a keen and overwhelming longing for that period when everything seems possible and yet somehow still entirely impossible to grasp. Tenderly, I Am Devoured has all the trappings of a story on the edge, what with its main character, Lacrimosa Arriscane, stuck between the mortal and chthonic realms, an old life and a new, and two loves competing for her heart. Ruinous as the very sea that borders the lands of Verse, Tenderly, I Am Devoured is a gothic horror romance that aches to reach a resting place forever out of reach. One I could not help but feel swept up in myself as Clipstone tethers her heroine to demonic gods and the unwise bargains they make with mortals. Tenderly, I Am Devoured is the gothic-horror-academia sibling to Ava Reid’s, A Study in Drowning, but given Clipstone’s unique authorial voice and intent. Transient as the middle place between adolescence and adulthood, the past and present both, Lyndall Clipstone traverses the places between—where myths are made real and where love is our strongest act of defiance.
Lyndall Clipstone’s, Tenderly, I Am Devoured is an evocative work of art. There’s no other way to describe a novel so carefully designed. It’s as if every detail was poured over and sculpted into this sharp gothic and dream fugued lighthouse to those lost and in need of sanctuary. Clipstone plants herself firmly in what she calls “Flower-threaded” horror and I think that is an apt comparison for a novel that so exquisitely bridges the amalgam of beauty and horror. Significant details play the boundary between beauty and grotesque—the chthonic liqueur staining the teeth in some kind of irrevocable marking of the divine, the power of the sea to buoy or to suffocate, and the dark salt mines made for prayer and for dark bargains. Every portion further imparts Clipstone’s unique blend of horror-romance and the contradictions she explores at the center of her work. Tied up in all of this is Lark herself, an Aphrodite-esque figure crafted through the power of the sea, clinging to a life of her own if she can free herself from a chthonic god. Very much here for the soft hearted heroines who don’t have to be perfect to be worthy, the ones who make mistakes and take charge without compromising the core of who they are. There’s power in softness and I know how personal it was for Clipstone to represent this through her main character. Lark wears her heart on her sleeve, and her depth of feeling appears boundless, a trait that echoes in the very fabric of this story and its decisive end.
Bordered by an intriguing mythology, a dash of academia, and disastrous bargains with the divine, Tenderly, I Am Devoured binds together a great deal in just one gothic fantasy novel. Yet, there’s considerable intent behind every single facet of this story and they are as tangible as if one could reach into the page and experience them firsthand. In concluding Tenderly, I am Devoured, bleeding hearts are laid bare as the past is exposed and the future safeguarded for our core trio. Lyndall Clipstone somehow manages to tie everything together in a way that is hopeful without veering too far into the realm of implausibility. There are costs for our characters which is true as life itself where going after anything you value is worth some kind of personal sacrifice. Among the weather-worn cottages and the luring waves, Clipstone reinforces this notion that part of human nature is to be adrift, but certainly we’re not meant to be alone. Chthonic gods, polyamorous romance, cults, and myth make up this gothic romantic fantasy that called to me like some kind of dark offering. From its intense academic setting to the haunting coast of Verse, Clipstone tests what we can weather if only we hold fast to each other against the storms ahead—even if one must at first give in to a god.
Thank you to Book Forward and the author for providing me with a physical advance review copy.
Trigger warnings: death, blood, murder, drowning, physical abuse, child abuse, death of a child, cults
Literaryrobin 