Yellow Jessamine by Caitlin Starling
Having thoroughly enjoyed Caitlin Starling’s 2019 novel The Luminous Dead, I was very happy to learn that I wouldn’t have to wait long to read more of her work.
Yellow Jessamine (2020), Starling’s new novella, is completely different from The Luminous Dead but similarly features creepy atmosphere, a background of family trauma, and relationships filled with dysfunctional tension and longing.
Evelyn Perdanu is a wealthy woman in the city of Delphinium, a city that is slowly dying now that its surrounding empire has fallen to a coup. Evelyn is involved in shipping, and is also an herbalist specializing in “fixes to unfixable problems.” The story begins when one of her ships brings home a strange illness, and on the same night, she finds an equally mysterious man lying by the road near her house, injured and near death.
Caitlin Starling
Yellow Jessamine will probably appeal to readers who also enjoyed books like Lane Robins’s Maledicte, with its decadent city setting and antiheroes. Starling sets the mood perfectly with the relentless rain that batters Delphinium, giving it the feel of a place that is dissolving literally as well as metaphorically.
Evelyn is kind of a terrible person — in the current climate, it’s especially hard to get behind a character who’s trying to downplay a deadly disease, not to mention some other awful things she does — but one has some sympathy for her as well. When we finally peel back the petals to find the tragedy at the heart of her life story, it’s devastating, and one of the most effective scenes in the book. It’s easy to understand what makes Evelyn as distrustful and paranoid as she is, but it can also be frustrating to read, especially when her ruthless actions undermine her own plans and goals.
Additionally, I felt that the story just needed a little more room to breathe. I kind of wanted it to be novel-length, so that there was more room to explore Evelyn, her relationship with Violetta, and the city and empire in which they live. Overall, I didn’t like it as much as I did The Luminous Dead, but it did satisfy the craving I sometimes get for gloomy cities and scheming poisoners.
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