I enjoyed The Death of Jane Lawrence so I decided to see what other books by Starling my library had on offer. I picked up this novella, hoping for some more spooky times, and I got that - at least at first. While individual parts of this book were interesting, as a whole, the story just did not cohere for me. Thus, my rating of 2.5 stars.

WRITING: Starling's prose in this book is ok. There are some things that are done well and some things I wish were different. I did like the gradual spread of the "plague" and the way the victims were described - Starling is good at creating some unsettling imagery. But when it came to crafting emotionally-resonant passages, I was left feeling a little empty. Pretty much everything that was supposed to have an emotional impact - Evelyn's past, her relationship with her family, her relationship with Violetta - felt told to us rather than shown, and on top of that, some of the prose buried us in overexplaining Evelyn's thoughts and reasoning. So while sentences themselves were clear and weird (in a good way), on a macro-level, I wanted a little more planning and less explanation of every little thing.

PLOT: The plot of this book follows Lady Evelyn Perdanu, a shipping magnate in the fictional city of Delphinium. Delphinium is the last city standing against an enemy force, coming to conquer their territory. Meanwhile, Evelyn notices one of her ships has brought in a "plague" that seems to be making its victims fixate on her. Evelyn becomes obsessed with deflecting attention away from her lest she be accused of bringing a plague to the city, and moreover, she becomes increasingly paranoid that the plague will uncover some of her past sins.

I liked the premise of this plot, but in practice, it seemed to be trying to take on too much. It wanted to be part political intrigue, part plague story, part supernatural, etc with some murder and eccentricity and plant stuff to boot. I never felt like all these elements cohered into something; I was pulled in so many different directions that by the end, I wasn't quite sure what was going on or what I was supposed to get out of everything.

I think this story could have been more successful if it had picked just a couple things and really focused on Evelyn's paranoia. Trying to do politics and poison and supernatural stuff and plague and police investigations and whatever else just stretched its themes too thin.

CHARACTERS: Evelyn, our protagonist, has a lot going on so it's hard to pin her down. One minute, she's a ruthless shipping magnate with a fierce determination to keep herself afloat. She has no qualms killing people who get in her way and cultivates a garden of poisonous plants to aid her. The next minute, she's an anxious mess who can't act and who bestows tinctures and herbal remedies on her fellow aristocrats as a means to ingratiate herself to them. Personally, I found her to be full of contradictions, and her spiral downward doesn't so much show a devolution in character as it does tell us that Evelyn has too many secrets to keep up with.

Violetta, Evelyn's assistant, is ok, but her relationship with Evelyn isn't as well-developed as I would have liked. This book advertises itself as queer horror, but personally, the queerness felt shallow since all the romantic (or potentially romantic) aspects of the relationship were told to us rather than shown. Violetta's role as a loyal employee was much stronger.

Other characters were fine, if under-used. The strange man that Evelyn and Violetta find on the side of the road seems to be an afterthought for most of the book, and we don't really see Evelyn try to use him to the degree that she wants to. The police officer (or equivalent, in this fantasy universe) is also too besotted with Evelyn to be seen as a real threat, and I would have liked to see his suspicion be used to heighten Evelyn's anxiety more and to create some tension. True, Evelyn does do her best to keep her secrets from him, but as a reader, I didn't feel like he was truly someone I had to worry about.

TL;DR: Yellow Jessamine is a novella that tries to do too much at the expense of creating a coherent narrative. While some of the creepier elements were fun and I loved the idea of a character being brought down by their own paranoia, there were simply too many elements that competed with one another.