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Our Fate Is Written in Books
Evangeline Snow and her family moved to York, England, to a house that deserves to be turned into a museum. A house that lived through the murders of Jack the Ripper to Harlod Shipman to Ted Bundy.
A Victorian house with floors that screech, dog-eared wallpaper, furniture that changed color because of age, narrow hallways that suffocate, mirrors that tell stories, rain droplets on the railings, to an attic that carries more than just clutter. The furniture grew eyes, the still shadows cast monsters that stretch to reach her.
This house is a wonder as to how it didn’t fall apart because of the mysteries it held and all the things it bore witness to.
She’s not happy with the move, she reads to escape, only she found a far more interesting book to read; a lunar-eyed boy she had seen at the bookstore.
Arthur Wood appears to be the one who is her getaway, all while running away from a past that is too grey to come to terms with. One that left him a divine butterfly with no wings.
A Victorian house with floors that screech, dog-eared wallpaper, furniture that changed color because of age, narrow hallways that suffocate, mirrors that tell stories, rain droplets on the railings, to an attic that carries more than just clutter. The furniture grew eyes, the still shadows cast monsters that stretch to reach her.
This house is a wonder as to how it didn’t fall apart because of the mysteries it held and all the things it bore witness to.
She’s not happy with the move, she reads to escape, only she found a far more interesting book to read; a lunar-eyed boy she had seen at the bookstore.
Arthur Wood appears to be the one who is her getaway, all while running away from a past that is too grey to come to terms with. One that left him a divine butterfly with no wings.
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First published August 31, 2024
1 person is currently reading
13 people want to read
About the author
Sara Hazem
3 books15 followersHello! I am Sara Hazem, a nineteen-year-old who fell in love with writing. I come from Alexandria, Egypt.
I started writing from a very young age, I started with dear diaries, then stories about lost princesses, to novels. As of right now, I have 3 published books!
I aspire to be a psychiatrist, clinical or forensic! I am a second year med student... it was really difficult balancing writing with studying, but I hope I figure it out soon.
I enjoy reading about crime cases and psychology!
I can't wait to see what life has in store for me.
I hope you enjoy my books, Vanilla Cake and The Icing on The Vanilla Cake, and my newest child Our Fate Is Written in Books!!! And the others that are yet to come!
You can find me on Instagram @saraxhzm
and YouTube where I cover crime stories (Mysteries)
I started writing from a very young age, I started with dear diaries, then stories about lost princesses, to novels. As of right now, I have 3 published books!
I aspire to be a psychiatrist, clinical or forensic! I am a second year med student... it was really difficult balancing writing with studying, but I hope I figure it out soon.
I enjoy reading about crime cases and psychology!
I can't wait to see what life has in store for me.
I hope you enjoy my books, Vanilla Cake and The Icing on The Vanilla Cake, and my newest child Our Fate Is Written in Books!!! And the others that are yet to come!
You can find me on Instagram @saraxhzm
and YouTube where I cover crime stories (Mysteries)
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
November 15, 2024
To speak of haunted houses in literature is to speak of time made manifest - of history compressed into creaking floorboards and peeling wallpaper, of memory transformed into architecture. And in this one, we encounter a house that functions less as setting than as ontological condition, a space where the present reeks of the past. This is both the novel's greatest strength and its most persistent weakness.
The central problem here is not one of imagination but of execution. Sara Hazem demonstrates an almost compulsive need to render the invisible visible, to transmute every whispered possibility into exhaustive description. Consider her treatment of fear: rather than allowing terror to emerge from the gaps between what is shown and what remains hidden, there is this insistent need to catalogue every tremor, every quickened heartbeat, every bead of sweat. This represents a fundamental misunderstanding of how horror functions in literature. Terror thrives not in accumulation but in withholding, the gaps between shown and hidden, the unseen that shapes the seen. By reducing fear to its symptoms, Sara forecloses on terror's true power, its ability to emerge naturally from the undisclosed.
However, Evangeline Snow emerges as the novel's most magnificent creation. In her, Sara has achieved something remarkable: a protagonist who feels less like a vehicle for supernatural encounters than a fully realized person who happens to stumble into them, a character who exits beyond the page's constraints. We do not read about Evangeline; we come to know her, to recognize the patterns of her speech, the cadences of her thought. When she stumbles into the uncanny, her responses feel somewhat real, the product of a distinct and fully realized psyche rather than a convenient plot device. She approaches her haunted circumstances with a refreshing combination of genre awareness and genuine vulnerability, creating moments of such authentic humanity that they cast the novel's other failings into sharper relief.
And by failings I mainly mean the cardinal sin committed in binding this vibrantly realized character to Arthur. The specifics of his situation - forty years and ten months sealed within what's essentially purgatory, trapped in a space between life and death, a man caught between the tick and the tock - should, on its own, carry the weight of existential horror. Where, then, is the psychological impact of such absolute isolation? Where is the terror of "existing" like that (or say, not fully consciously existing), neither fully present nor fully absent, conscious yet untethered from time's progression? someone who has endured such profound separation from existence should have a more fundamental alienation from human connection, should show some trace of that terrible solitude.
This failure of characterization creates a devastating ripple effect. Sara plays with dramatic irony, Evangeline's ignorance (and ours) of Arthur's true nature until the climactic revelation, but doesn't layer his character with the kind of subtle wrongness that would make the twist resonate. And when the truth emerges, it feels less like a devastating realization and more like a plot point finally arrived at its scheduled time.
Arthur himself presents a more complex problem. In attempting to render him both love interest and other-worldly revelation, Sara has created a figure who kind of succeeds as neither. His characterization suffers from a flattening of existential horror into aesthetic surface. That he has endured decades of fog-minded isolation without developing any corresponding depth of perspective suggests not otherworldliness but timidity on the author's part. The relationship between Arthur and Evangeline thus becomes an exercise in what Roland Barthes meant by the "already-read", a reproduction of romance tropes here that acknowledges neither their psychological weight nor their implications. And this in turn inevitably infects our relationship with Evangeline herself, which is familiar to anyone that has read or watched romance (or literally any genre), when we can't invest in the target of a protagonist's affections, our connection to the protagonist themselves begins to waver. For example, Diane Setterfield's "The Thirteenth Tale" does this well and lets us remain invested in Margaret even as she becomes consumed by Vida's mysteries and that is precisely because Vida's inscrutability feels purposeful, laden with meaning rather than merely underwritten. Or how Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw" maintains our investment in the governess even as her reliability comes into question, because her obsession feels psychologically coherent, each step toward potential madness earning its way. I guess you could say that love's irrationality here is precisely the point, that teenage infatuation especially possesses its own dream-logic that defies any motivation. We need look no further than Emily Brontë's "Wuthering Heights" to see how effectively romance can leverage this truth, Cathy's attachment to Heathcliff works precisely because his otherworldliness is threaded through every interaction, his wrongness making her attraction to him feel both inevitable and doomed.
But here we have neither the psychological complexity of James nor the intensity of Brontë. Instead, Evangeline's attachment to Arthur feels like watching a chess grandmaster become obsessed with tic-tac-toe - the diminishment of her character isn't romantic but reductive. When she, with all her sharp observations and keener wit, gets obsessed with the equivalent of a walking cardboard, we begin to question not just her judgment but our own initial investment in her perspective. It's reminiscent of the later Twilight novels, where Bella's single-minded focus on Edward gradually erodes the more interesting aspects of her character, or the way "Beautiful Creatures" lets Lena's personality dissolve into her relationship with Ethan.
The tragedy here isn't that Evangeline falls in love with someone who exists somewhat adjacent to mortality - it's that in doing so, she becomes somewhat adjacent to the character we first met and loved. This distancing effect ripples outward through the novel: as our connection to Evangeline weakens, so too does our investment in the house's mysteries, in the unfolding supernatural elements, in the very stakes of the story itself. When we stop fully believing in the emotional reality of a character's choices, we stop fully inhabiting the world those choices shape.
Yet beneath these structural concerns, Sara's prose reveals moments of startling brilliance - when she steps out of her own way and allows the language to breathe. There are instances when her writing achieves a pristine perfection that makes you catch your breath and they work precisely because they're allowed to stand alone, unadorned by additional explanation or metaphoric excess. Her metaphoric parallelism describing the color grey: "grey was always a color of storms and heavy days, grey was always the elegant color of that knitted sweater I've forgotten about, grey was always the grim color of tombstones, however grey was now Arthur Wood's eyes" - works because each iteration builds upon the last, transforming a simple color into an emotional landscape before connecting it, devastatingly, to our love interest. The anaphoric repetition here isn't merely decorative, it's performing the gradual accumulation of meaning, showing us how ordinary things become laden with significance. There's this undercurrent of time and waiting in her prose that sneaks up on you when you least expect it.
Even her occasional tendency toward purple prose serves a purpose, though maybe sometimes not the one intended. In moments of high emotion, Evangeline's thoughts spiral into elaborate metaphors - "Butterfly wings fluttered against the walls of my stomach; little ones were around my heart, their wings wafting a gentle gust to cool my insides" - creating a kind of linguistic excess that mirrors teenage feeling. It's overdone, yes, but overdone in a way that feels true to a character who lives half in books already, who processes her experiences through the lens of literature. Her prose knows how to dance between several things at once, from Evangeline's recurring snark about "being a book cannibal" to passages of genuine lyrical beauty that feel earned rather than applied. When Sara trusts herself enough to let a moment breathe, to describe the play of moonlight on warped floorboards without feeling compelled to add three more metaphors, she achieves what more established writers might envy. Most promising is her ability to capture the small, human moments that anchor supernatural events in emotional reality. The way she describes the ever-so mundane everyday things in a new beautiful way, the tale about the sun feeding its children behind clouds - They all show a writer who knows how to find the extraordinary within the ordinary.
The central problem here is not one of imagination but of execution. Sara Hazem demonstrates an almost compulsive need to render the invisible visible, to transmute every whispered possibility into exhaustive description. Consider her treatment of fear: rather than allowing terror to emerge from the gaps between what is shown and what remains hidden, there is this insistent need to catalogue every tremor, every quickened heartbeat, every bead of sweat. This represents a fundamental misunderstanding of how horror functions in literature. Terror thrives not in accumulation but in withholding, the gaps between shown and hidden, the unseen that shapes the seen. By reducing fear to its symptoms, Sara forecloses on terror's true power, its ability to emerge naturally from the undisclosed.
However, Evangeline Snow emerges as the novel's most magnificent creation. In her, Sara has achieved something remarkable: a protagonist who feels less like a vehicle for supernatural encounters than a fully realized person who happens to stumble into them, a character who exits beyond the page's constraints. We do not read about Evangeline; we come to know her, to recognize the patterns of her speech, the cadences of her thought. When she stumbles into the uncanny, her responses feel somewhat real, the product of a distinct and fully realized psyche rather than a convenient plot device. She approaches her haunted circumstances with a refreshing combination of genre awareness and genuine vulnerability, creating moments of such authentic humanity that they cast the novel's other failings into sharper relief.
And by failings I mainly mean the cardinal sin committed in binding this vibrantly realized character to Arthur. The specifics of his situation - forty years and ten months sealed within what's essentially purgatory, trapped in a space between life and death, a man caught between the tick and the tock - should, on its own, carry the weight of existential horror. Where, then, is the psychological impact of such absolute isolation? Where is the terror of "existing" like that (or say, not fully consciously existing), neither fully present nor fully absent, conscious yet untethered from time's progression? someone who has endured such profound separation from existence should have a more fundamental alienation from human connection, should show some trace of that terrible solitude.
This failure of characterization creates a devastating ripple effect. Sara plays with dramatic irony, Evangeline's ignorance (and ours) of Arthur's true nature until the climactic revelation, but doesn't layer his character with the kind of subtle wrongness that would make the twist resonate. And when the truth emerges, it feels less like a devastating realization and more like a plot point finally arrived at its scheduled time.
Arthur himself presents a more complex problem. In attempting to render him both love interest and other-worldly revelation, Sara has created a figure who kind of succeeds as neither. His characterization suffers from a flattening of existential horror into aesthetic surface. That he has endured decades of fog-minded isolation without developing any corresponding depth of perspective suggests not otherworldliness but timidity on the author's part. The relationship between Arthur and Evangeline thus becomes an exercise in what Roland Barthes meant by the "already-read", a reproduction of romance tropes here that acknowledges neither their psychological weight nor their implications. And this in turn inevitably infects our relationship with Evangeline herself, which is familiar to anyone that has read or watched romance (or literally any genre), when we can't invest in the target of a protagonist's affections, our connection to the protagonist themselves begins to waver. For example, Diane Setterfield's "The Thirteenth Tale" does this well and lets us remain invested in Margaret even as she becomes consumed by Vida's mysteries and that is precisely because Vida's inscrutability feels purposeful, laden with meaning rather than merely underwritten. Or how Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw" maintains our investment in the governess even as her reliability comes into question, because her obsession feels psychologically coherent, each step toward potential madness earning its way. I guess you could say that love's irrationality here is precisely the point, that teenage infatuation especially possesses its own dream-logic that defies any motivation. We need look no further than Emily Brontë's "Wuthering Heights" to see how effectively romance can leverage this truth, Cathy's attachment to Heathcliff works precisely because his otherworldliness is threaded through every interaction, his wrongness making her attraction to him feel both inevitable and doomed.
But here we have neither the psychological complexity of James nor the intensity of Brontë. Instead, Evangeline's attachment to Arthur feels like watching a chess grandmaster become obsessed with tic-tac-toe - the diminishment of her character isn't romantic but reductive. When she, with all her sharp observations and keener wit, gets obsessed with the equivalent of a walking cardboard, we begin to question not just her judgment but our own initial investment in her perspective. It's reminiscent of the later Twilight novels, where Bella's single-minded focus on Edward gradually erodes the more interesting aspects of her character, or the way "Beautiful Creatures" lets Lena's personality dissolve into her relationship with Ethan.
The tragedy here isn't that Evangeline falls in love with someone who exists somewhat adjacent to mortality - it's that in doing so, she becomes somewhat adjacent to the character we first met and loved. This distancing effect ripples outward through the novel: as our connection to Evangeline weakens, so too does our investment in the house's mysteries, in the unfolding supernatural elements, in the very stakes of the story itself. When we stop fully believing in the emotional reality of a character's choices, we stop fully inhabiting the world those choices shape.
Yet beneath these structural concerns, Sara's prose reveals moments of startling brilliance - when she steps out of her own way and allows the language to breathe. There are instances when her writing achieves a pristine perfection that makes you catch your breath and they work precisely because they're allowed to stand alone, unadorned by additional explanation or metaphoric excess. Her metaphoric parallelism describing the color grey: "grey was always a color of storms and heavy days, grey was always the elegant color of that knitted sweater I've forgotten about, grey was always the grim color of tombstones, however grey was now Arthur Wood's eyes" - works because each iteration builds upon the last, transforming a simple color into an emotional landscape before connecting it, devastatingly, to our love interest. The anaphoric repetition here isn't merely decorative, it's performing the gradual accumulation of meaning, showing us how ordinary things become laden with significance. There's this undercurrent of time and waiting in her prose that sneaks up on you when you least expect it.
Even her occasional tendency toward purple prose serves a purpose, though maybe sometimes not the one intended. In moments of high emotion, Evangeline's thoughts spiral into elaborate metaphors - "Butterfly wings fluttered against the walls of my stomach; little ones were around my heart, their wings wafting a gentle gust to cool my insides" - creating a kind of linguistic excess that mirrors teenage feeling. It's overdone, yes, but overdone in a way that feels true to a character who lives half in books already, who processes her experiences through the lens of literature. Her prose knows how to dance between several things at once, from Evangeline's recurring snark about "being a book cannibal" to passages of genuine lyrical beauty that feel earned rather than applied. When Sara trusts herself enough to let a moment breathe, to describe the play of moonlight on warped floorboards without feeling compelled to add three more metaphors, she achieves what more established writers might envy. Most promising is her ability to capture the small, human moments that anchor supernatural events in emotional reality. The way she describes the ever-so mundane everyday things in a new beautiful way, the tale about the sun feeding its children behind clouds - They all show a writer who knows how to find the extraordinary within the ordinary.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 6, 2024
A book which is engaging you from first page, with great pace.
Keep going Sara
Keep going Sara
March 23, 2025
It’s not everyday that you read a thought provoking captivating horror novel with a sub-plot of romance.
The story follows Evangeline, a young woman who has recently moved to a new town. Into her family’s dream house that they’ve been saving up for ages for. She meets Arthur, the grey-eyed library boy, what could go wrong? Only one way to find out.
This book kept me tiptoeing around the house as I stayed up to read it, it had me both STRESSING and ADORING Arthur. Especially, since the nickname he gives Evangeline ‘angel’ is the meaning of my name.
The author, Sara Hazem achieved something not many can do. I’m going to be honest here, as someone who can almost always expect the plot of any book or movie, I didn’t see this plot coming…at all.
By the end of this book I was holding back my own tears on the bus. WHAT? WHEN? HOW? WHY?
Overall, I genuinely loved this book and I can’t wait for more to come, now call me biased because I know the author, but when it comes to judging books I am no better than a paid critic.
Note to author : Sara, I am proud of your work and I really enjoyed reading it. Thank you for scaring me, as per your previous threat. You outdid your threat in more ways than one. Making me scared from the paranormal, for Angel & Arthur and for my life.
The story follows Evangeline, a young woman who has recently moved to a new town. Into her family’s dream house that they’ve been saving up for ages for. She meets Arthur, the grey-eyed library boy, what could go wrong? Only one way to find out.
This book kept me tiptoeing around the house as I stayed up to read it, it had me both STRESSING and ADORING Arthur. Especially, since the nickname he gives Evangeline ‘angel’ is the meaning of my name.
The author, Sara Hazem achieved something not many can do. I’m going to be honest here, as someone who can almost always expect the plot of any book or movie, I didn’t see this plot coming…at all.
By the end of this book I was holding back my own tears on the bus. WHAT? WHEN? HOW? WHY?
Overall, I genuinely loved this book and I can’t wait for more to come, now call me biased because I know the author, but when it comes to judging books I am no better than a paid critic.
Note to author : Sara, I am proud of your work and I really enjoyed reading it. Thank you for scaring me, as per your previous threat. You outdid your threat in more ways than one. Making me scared from the paranormal, for Angel & Arthur and for my life.
April 10, 2025
It’s not everyday that you read a thought provoking captivating horror novel with a sub-plot of romance.
The story follows Evangeline, a young woman who has recently moved to a new town. Into her family’s dream house that they’ve been saving up for ages for. She meets Arthur, the grey-eyed library boy, what could go wrong? Only one way to find out.
This book kept me tiptoeing around the house as I stayed up to read it, it had me both STRESSING and ADORING Arthur. Especially, since the nickname he gives Evangeline ‘angel’ is the meaning of my name.
The author, Sara Hazem achieved something not many can do. I’m going to be honest here, as someone who can almost always expect the plot of any book or movie, I didn’t see this plot coming…at all.
By the end of this book I was holding back my own tears on the bus. WHAT? WHEN? HOW? WHY?
Overall, I genuinely loved this book and I can’t wait for more to come, now call me biased because I know the author, but when it comes to judging books I am no better than a paid critic.
Note to author : Sara, I am proud of your work and I really enjoyed reading it. Thank you for scaring me, as per your previous threat. You outdid your threat in more ways than one. Making me scared from the paranormal, for Angel & Arthur and for my life
The story follows Evangeline, a young woman who has recently moved to a new town. Into her family’s dream house that they’ve been saving up for ages for. She meets Arthur, the grey-eyed library boy, what could go wrong? Only one way to find out.
This book kept me tiptoeing around the house as I stayed up to read it, it had me both STRESSING and ADORING Arthur. Especially, since the nickname he gives Evangeline ‘angel’ is the meaning of my name.
The author, Sara Hazem achieved something not many can do. I’m going to be honest here, as someone who can almost always expect the plot of any book or movie, I didn’t see this plot coming…at all.
By the end of this book I was holding back my own tears on the bus. WHAT? WHEN? HOW? WHY?
Overall, I genuinely loved this book and I can’t wait for more to come, now call me biased because I know the author, but when it comes to judging books I am no better than a paid critic.
Note to author : Sara, I am proud of your work and I really enjoyed reading it. Thank you for scaring me, as per your previous threat. You outdid your threat in more ways than one. Making me scared from the paranormal, for Angel & Arthur and for my life
December 7, 2024
Reading this book has been such an incredible journey. I felt every bit of emotion on the spectrum of feelings. It’s definitely horror but at the same time holds a lot of other aspects to it. And oh my god I cried more than I’d like to admit. The writing was my favourite thing about this book. The smart use of words and the descriptive skills were on another level. At some points I had to stop and just admire what was written for a few seconds.
Overall If I could describe this book in one sentence I’d say it’s Greyishly beautiful. I loved every part of it
Overall If I could describe this book in one sentence I’d say it’s Greyishly beautiful. I loved every part of it
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews