Review - The Place Where They Buried Your Heart by Christina Henry

The Place Where They Buried Your Heart

Christina Henry
Titan Books, 4 November 2025
Available as: PB, 352pp audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781835412640

I'm grateful to the publisher for giving me access to an advance e-copy of The Place Where They Buried Your Heart to consider for review.

As a reader I'm endlessly fascinated by the way that books reflect their authors' own worlds both overtly - a book set in the US will of course use different language and make different assumptions from one that takes place in the UK - and in terms of tropes, attitudes and lifestyles.

Take for example that idea of the scary old house in the neighbourhood. The run down place the kids dare one another to go into at midnight. That is very much a US thing, I think, I don't think it occurs much in UK writing (or indeed real life!  - I live in the UK and always have done). Perhaps this is because here a, say, 100 year old abandoned property is not really old. That is, it may be old enough to be squalid but not scary. Not far away will be an 800 year old church or a 500 year old Tudor cottage, and those are old old. 

Or it may be because we have less space and the idea of an abandoned mansion up on the hill is less plausible. Given house prices it probably won't be empty anyway.

So I approach a book like The Place Where they Buried Your Heart with interest, wanting to see not just how the story unfolds but how this trope works out in the context of the plot - how the idea is justified and where it leads, what it means in the context of a modern urban setting for there to be such a feature. And perhaps most of all, why the authorities don't just do something when kids begin disappearing?

In this book, Jessie Campanelli's life is entwined with such a house. It is her fear and her shame. Early on in the story, she suffers a loss when she dares her little brother Paul to go in the house, largely to get rid of him when she wants to sulk. Of course Paul vanished and Jessie is left with a burden of guilt. Henry then very subtly, very cleverly, shows us how that guilt warps Jessie's subsequent life and how Paul's loss breaks her family - first her father, and then her mother. Setting aside the fantastical element this is a very human story of loss and grieving and pain as we see the Campanelli family fail, and Jessie grow up, living in the same familiar neighbourhood as it changes and the old people move out and new people move in.

All that time, the empty house sits, untouched, waiting, malign. It's a like or there-not-there presence both in Jessie's life - at one level it haunts her, at another she puts it out of mind. The house is also present but not present in wider affairs: yes, Jessie's neighbourhood is gentrifying and the site must be valuable, but a string of... accidents... convinced everyone to leave well alone.

Except the kids.

And now Jessie's got a daughter of her own...

I found this a satisfying, fun and creepy novel on many levels. Jessie's a perfect t rounded character in herself, seeking to make something of her twisted life, a determined fighter who takes no crap from anyone - not her dead-end boyfriend, not that creepy house, not the few bad neighbours (there are many good, supportive ones). Watching her cope with grief and guilt is painful and sad, but she's a survivor.

A book I'd strongly recommend.

For more information about The Place Where they Buried Your Heart, see the publisher's website here.