Once upon a time, a man who believed in fairy tales married a beautiful, mysterious woman named Indigo Maxwell-Casteñada. He was a scholar of myths. She was heiress to a fortune. They exchanged gifts and stories and believed they would live happily ever after—and in exchange for her love, Indigo extracted a promise: that her bridegroom would never pry into her past.
But when Indigo learns that her estranged aunt is dying and the couple is forced to return to her childhood home, the House of Dreams, the bridegroom will soon find himself unable to resist. For within the crumbling manor’s extravagant rooms and musty halls, there lurks the shadow of another girl: Azure, Indigo’s dearest childhood friend who suddenly disappeared. As the house slowly reveals his wife’s secrets, the bridegroom will be forced to choose between reality and fantasy, even if doing so threatens to destroy their marriage . . . or their lives.
Chokshi’s fairytale gothic takes great inspiration from the Bluebeard tale with a gender-bending twist as the unnamed Bridgegroom is desperately in love with Indigo. So much so, it’s like a dream. A fairytale, but curiosity is a human trait that always spells doom. Indigo’s rule for him not to peek into the locked room obviously sparks suspicion and her mother’s cryptic mutterings and her fascination with the Musuline story doesn’t help.
Indigo is set up as the ultimate cool girl, an unearthly beauty who’s viciousness one excuses because she’s so bewitching. That’s the main impression one gets from the Bridgroom’s POV and that from Azure, Indigo’s ex-best friend who mysteriously disappeared and the Bridgegroom suspects Indigo murdered. This is where the fantasy aspect comes in as Indigo and Azure’s unhealthy romance is overshadowed by Indigo’s obsession with becoming part of the Underworld, and Azure has too many earthly attachments to want to leave. The plot twist at the end of the story was just as predictable as their characters.
While Chokshi’s prose is enthralling, paying homage to the lush fairytale descriptions of the Dream House, Indigo and Azure with a spark of menaching violence like the Grimm fairytales, the characters themselves don’t have much depth. Indigo doesn’t evolve beyond the cool, mean girl archtype. Beautiful, cruel, bewitching with the fantastical addition that this mundane world is too boring for her. Azure’s journey from estranged relationship with her mother, falling in love with Indigo and realizing that her love isn’t enough for her to ignore Indigo’s callous disregard for others was predictable. Their friendship was oviously codependent with lesbian undertones that felt reductive.
The Bridgegroom as a stand-in for the faceless Bride from the original Bluebeard doesn’t have much character either besides hopeless romantic. He’s so much of a plot device, I couldn’t even buy the final love declaration or how it signified being a light in (spoiler’s) damaged self-esteem because I wasn’t invested in any of them.
Chokshi’s writing draws you in, but it feels like a glossy silent film that you admire for its beauty but the themes and arc are too familiar to be entertaining.
2 stars
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