Title : His empire
Author: Claire Castillon
Release date : September 21, 2023
Gender : Novel
Claire Castillon has the art of scraping the scabs off the nastiest wounds. Once again, this author who we love very much in the editorial team hits the mark with a story of a woman under influence.
The story is told from the point of view of an 8-year-old girl whose mother meets a new lover. Due to her age, the little girl does not always perceive – or with a time lag – the perversion of this man, unlike the reader who identifies it quite quickly.
Everything, but absolutely everything this woman does or says, is called into question by her companion. In the futile department, we will move from a rant about the choice of a particular brand of biscuits or the very strong (and frankly very annoying) mockery of cinematographic tastes, passing by the much more thorny subject of education of the little girl. Indeed, this guy, who we would like to tell to mind his own business, dares to do anything. Because the guy has plenty of arguments in his bag. Coaxing, making people feel guilty and belittling while being saccharine have become mantras that he seems to repeat to himself every day to achieve his ends.
Very often this mother annoys us by continually falling back into the seductive clutches of her man, covering him up and laughing at his humiliations. The reader has sufficient perspective to scream at this woman “Get out of there!” “, but once mired in this unhealthy spiral, victims generally have difficulty getting out of it. And even if they succeed, the after-effects are there and the worst is perhaps yet to come. Not all of that is fun! And yet, this psychological novel reads frantically, like a thriller, a formula already observed in the novels of this brilliant author who manages to insert suspense into a suffocating family setting.
Claire Castillon had the brilliant idea of putting us at a child’s level to understand this chilling and unfortunately banal story, which shows us that whatever the target set by a manipulator, the whole family ends up suffering.
And the worst part of this story is that we all know this type of toxic personality and we frighteningly manage to put a familiar face on this character. People who walk around with impunity and whose damage caused will never be reimbursed by social security. Claire Castillon may have wanted to warn us against these unsociable people and, if necessary, to scream in our faces: “Get out of your way! »
