REVIEW: The Winter Garden by Kara Jorgensen 

(5/5 stars *****)

If you want a tale of suspense, thrills, and the supernatural, you’ve come to the right review. Kara Jorgensen’s second self-published novel is just as good as her first (see REVIEW: The Earl of Brass), adding the dark world of the spiritualist movement to her series.

What I came away with after reading this novel was a sense of the author’s emotional sensitivity. Though the book covers the supernatural and steampunk, it is not purely an adventure story of a German student or a Bildungsroman of a young, naïve spiritualist. The novel covers some dark material: serial murder, horrendous torture and the death of loved ones. Though the tone is often bleak (especially the chapters covering Immanuel’s torture- the young German student) and Jorgensen’s descriptions of wounds very detailed (I like that thing myself but for the faint hearted, I’d skip a few lines every now and…