Review: The Spellbook of Katrina Van Tassel: A Story of Sleepy Hollow

The Spellbook of Katrina Van Tassel: A Story of Sleepy Hollow by Alyssa Palombo
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Thanks to Netgalley, St. Martin’s Press and Alyssa Palombo for an ARC in exchange for an honest review. My opinions are 100% my own and independent of receiving an advanced copy.

A crispness in the air lets you know October is here and the time for some spooky reads is upon us. This is my first one for this month and a retelling of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” from Katrina’s perspective sounded right up my alley. I was really excited for this one. Unfortunately, it didn’t live up to my expectations and it was more sleepy and hollow than I wanted.

Palombo has given us, in her words, a feminist retelling of the classic tale. She has taken some liberties, as often is the case in a retell and I was fine with her choices. For myself, I don’t care if jack-o-lanterns weren’t around in the 1700, or the type of tarot cards she used was historically inaccurate -they served the story. I’m not convinced of the feminist claim, other than the fact that Katrina is a fully flushed out character and the story is told from her perspective. I guess giving her more agency in the events might be enough for a case to be made. I appreciated the fact that she made Sleepy Hollow, an actual place, “otherwordly” as to allow for superstitions to breed and magical events to take place.

Katrina is an only child of a wealthy farming family when Ichabod Crane come to town. He is to replace the schoolteacher and he supplements his meagre income by conducting music lessons for those in town. The two begin an illicit affair and eventually fall in love and want to get married. But not if Brom Bones has anything to say about it. He has threatened Crane more than once, warning him to stay away from Katrina. Once childhood friends, he is obsessive about making Katrina his wife. However, Katrina will have nothing to do with him after he ruined her best friend Charlotte’s life by spreading a rumour that she is a witch. Charlotte and her mother are healers and know the of the special properties of different herbs. But only those close to Charlotte know that she has a special intuition because if people in the town knew, they would turn against them. Brom knows better than to label her a witch but he has turned cruel since becoming a man. Katrina’s father has been putting a lot of pressure on Katrina to accept Brom as he believes this to be a good match. Her father has high hopes of joining their two farms together knowing that this will provide for his daughter long after he is gone. But Katrina knows her heart and it is set on Crane. She is crushed when her father declines Crane’s proposal to court his daughter. And now Ichabod has gone missing. Everyone in town has heard the tale of the Headless Horseman. Could Ichabod have fallen as one of his victims? Or did he really just abandon Katrina after being denied by her father. Was he just after her fortune after all? Or did something fouler take place. Katrina must have answers and she is not above using magic to find out.

So I loved the premise of the story and the outline sounded so exciting. Once I started to read, however, it fell rather flat for me. I did not relate to Katrina at all, finding her rather unlikable. She was self-centred, a rotten friend to Charlotte, and rather spoiled. Also, I needed Ichabod to be stronger and sexier. I don’t really know what his appeal was. He deferred to Katrina a lot, well she was bossy, but he never took matters into his own hands. He was supposed to be of high moral character, but the first thing he did after coming to town was to bed the teenage daughter of the man whose house he was staying at and food he was eating. Then snuck around for months, sleeping with her. Uhmm, yeah - not so moral after all. There was something about the writing style that bothered me. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but it was off-putting. Plus, the story really dragged on. I wanted to stop a couple of times and if I had put it down, there wasn’t enough of a draw to make me pick it up again. I would have loved more magic, and one spell would have been nice. Given that this was a Headless Horseman tale, there should have been a stronger connection to the tale. It was weak at best.
There was a lot of potential for a rich story. I didn’t enjoy this one. It really was more of a sleepy (a really yawn) and hollow (with no substance) tale.

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