Review: The Mirror House Girls - Faith Gardner

Review: The Mirror House Girls - Faith Gardner - January 2025

Winona is looking for somewhere to belong after her grandmother dies and the guy she was dating turned out to be married and have a family. When she meets Dakota at a grief group, she is invited to check out the eccentric Mirror House. Faith Gardner turns that achingly ordinary human need into the engine of a slow-burn cult thriller that gets under your skin long before it scares you.

Simon Spellmeyer is  a charismatic psychologist whose self-improvement protocols feel plausible enough to make you uneasy about your own susceptibility. He stays dangerously reasonable for most of the novel, which is exactly what makes the story work. As someone who has read almost everything Faith Gardner has written, I recognised her signature move here: making you understand, page by page, how intelligent people end up somewhere they never intended to go.

The first half of the novel is its strongest. The atmosphere of Mirror House , the strange rituals, fractured intimacies, the creeping erosion of Winona's own instincts is rendered with real craft. The relationships among the housemates feel lived-in and complicated, and watching those bonds curdle under Simon's influence is genuinely affecting.

Where The Mirror House Girls stumbles, for me, is in its second half. Once the group relocates and the pace shifts toward thriller territory, some of the psychological subtlety gives way to plot mechanics. The final act resolves things more tidily than the material perhaps warrants. Winona's awakening, when it comes, felt slightly rushed and I wanted to sit longer in the discomfort of her realisation.

Still, this is a novel with a great deal to admire. Faith Gardner writes compulsively readable prose, her dialogue crackles, and she clearly understands both the sociology of high-control groups and the interior experience of being inside one. For readers who loved her earlier work, this won't disappoint. For newcomers, it's a strong introduction to a writer who keeps getting more ambitious with each book.

Amazon: https://amzn.to/4xdR1yU