Yet another book about a yet another haunted house: a review of You Did Nothing Wrong

I think I prefer the author as a YA writer. What I like about C.G. Drews is how they portray angst in an unapologetically lyrical manner, which is harder to execute in adult novels. Stressed out adults like Elodie January can have some angst too, but I think the writing here lacks the restraint necessary to make Elodie and her husband feel like they're truly in their twenties.

Elodie's excuse is that she's had a tough life that has prevented her from maturing at a normal rate. At sixteen, she got pregnant. Now a young and lonely mother of an autistic son, she attaches herself to the only man who seems willing to support her economic, emotional, and sexual needs. He moves her to a house that is definitely haunted, where she becomes pregnant with her second child. The fact that she's full of angst and hormones is totally valid, but the heavy focus on it is awkward. It all lands with a feral intensity that works way better in Drews's past books about queer neurodivergent kids coming of age. You Did Nothing Wrong is more going for an unhinged and unsympathetic mother who mostly just comes across as cringey and melodramatic. She sounds like she spends too much time writing Supernatural fanfiction on Tumblr.

In the first half of the book, this setup works, raising psychologically compelling questions about nontraditional family structures, motherhood, pregnancy, insecurities, trauma, neurodivergence, and the sacrifices that vulnerable people make when they feel they have no better options. However, in the second half of the book, Elodie starts getting more frustrating as a character. Her sanity erodes, her motivations flatten, she loses a lot of her multidimensionality, the plot goes off the rails, and things drag on longer than necessary.

I can grant that all of my complaints are a little unfair. You Did Nothing Wrong is primarily a horror novel, not a character study. The gothic vibes themselves are solid. It's dark, moody, and chilling, though I do miss all the plant imagery from Don't Let the Forest in and Hazelthorn. The setting here is more pedestrian, bearing similarities to some of the author's older works like The Boy Who Steals Houses (but with less romance) or A Thousand Perfect Notes (but with a more sympathetic mother), neither of which are Drews's best books, but still, if you like creepy mansions, then You Did Nothing Wrong should scratch that itch. For me, the atmosphere is strong, but not extraordinary, and it's a little too generic to distract from my other issues with the book.