Green creates an uglier, more frightening antagonist than any monster or ghost.
I discovered Carrie Green while on the hunt for fellow female horror authors. What I love about her work is that her characters are the real people among us everyday who’ve been deformed inwardly by dark motivations. There is no exception for her novella, Violets Are Blue. What’s the most most frightening monster of all? A hateful mother-in-law.
Violets Are Blue – Blurb
Newly-wed Sarah is delighted to move in with her mother-in-law, Martha, a widower who had raised her son, by herself, on an isolated Midwest farm.
A kid from a broken home who had been raised in a group house in Chicago, Sarah had struggled to put herself through college on scholarships.
She considered herself self-reliant and willing to work hard for her dreams. She wants only one thing in life—a real family.
Todd was the love of her life, so that she was sure that she’d love Martha, too.
It never occurred to Sarah that Martha would see her as competition, to be eliminated.
Violets Are Blue – Review
***** 5 Stars – Every woman’s worst nightmare.
Imagine finding the perfect man. He looks like a Greek god, he’s hardworking, and has a charming personality. Your dreams come true when you get married and move from the city to the vast farm he grew up on. You look to the future with hope.
This is the dream of Sarah. She is unsure about moving to the country, but full of curiosity and willingness to adapt to her new life. She arrives with her new husband, Todd, at the farm and christens their love in the cornfield.
Everything is fine except the fact that her Todd’s mother, Martha, still lives in the house and is not going anywhere. She is a widow whose husband died in a freak farm accident, and her son has taken place as the man in her life.
Sarah tries her best to win the hulking, bitter old woman’s approval, but to no avail. In fact, Martha begins to actively antagonize Sarah, but Todd is unwilling to accept that his mother could do anything wrong.
Sarah knows it’s a no-win situation. She resigns to avoiding Martha and doing the best she can to focus on loving her husband instead of the worrying about what the old woman thinks. But Martha is not going to stand by quietly and watch the couple live happily ever after.
This is one of those stories that is infuriating and suffocating. Once Sarah marries Todd, she marries his family, and it’s too late to escape. Also, the reader knows Martha is evil and her well-meaning son cannot see it. The protagonist is without one ally.
I deeply sympathized with Sarah and how she tried to make the best of a nightmare – being trapped alone in a house day after day with someone who maliciously hates her. Green creates an uglier, more frightening antagonist than any monster or ghost.
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