Andromeda is tired, hot, hungry and desperate for shelter. She has been living on the streets, using all the skills she has been taught by her mentor to stay alive. This mentor may have raised her since five and taught her all she knows, but he is also the reason she is on the streets.

Her training was to become a debtera – a skilled exorcist of rooms, or even whole houses of evil forces called the evil eye. She has been thrown a life-line, being offered a job at a huge home in the Ethiopian desert. As an unlicensed and young debtera at only 19, it’s her only chance of finding work and a future in it.

The home is vast and terribly infected by multiple evil spirits. One in the library throws books – hard. One fills rooms with blood. Another sends snow from the ceiling, helping ensure the entire house remains bitterly cold no matter how hot it is outside.

Relieved to have found all that she will need to survive, Andromeda meets the staff and the owner of the mansion – Magnus Rochester. He is only a year older than Andi and initially strange, demanding and and infuriating. Needing the job, Andi bites her tongue against his rudeness.

But he is also desperate – to rid his home of the evil eye that has killed many, and defeated 10 other debtera before Andromeda. She’s not sure whether she would have taken the job if she’d known this, but has nowhere else to go. She gets to work… and falls in love.

Loosely based around the wonderful classic Jane Eyre, Within These Wicked Walls is a tale of determination, strength, first love and monsters. Raised with no love, but instilled with survival skills by her powerful but poor debtera mentor, Andromeda is a feisty character. She sticks up for herself and others, hanging onto an optimism her mentor tried everything to rid her of.

This courage and optimism drives Andromeda forwards, not only to perform her duties as a debtera, but to protect her heart against a man who seems to want to hurt it, and call on her decades hardened mentor when needed.

The world building of a house controlled by evil is described in detail to put the reader alongside Andromeda, and her battles with the evil entities are riveting.

The name Rochester took me straight back to Jane Eyre. The more I read the more I enjoyed the connections between this Ethiopian desert fantasy and a novel set in wintery England written in 1847, all the while as it told its own (often gruesome) story.

Great read.

Author – Lauren Blackwood

Age – 13+

(2022, Hachette, Little Brown, Ethiopa, Courage, Strength, Optimism, Survival, Fight, Battle, Evil, Amulets, Mentor, Exorcist, Jane Eyre, Connections, Poverty, Secrets, Relationships, Death, Blood, Haunted House, First love, Manifestations, Romance, Fantasy, Historical, Horror, Murder)