Katy HaysCritiques

The Cloisters by Katy Hays is an excellent read for fans of dark academia and magical realism. Ann Stillwell, desperate to leave the town she grew up in and move on from the death of her father, moves to New York to work for the Met for the summer. When a mix-up happens, she instead finds herself working on a research project at the Cloisters, a museum dedicated to European Medieval art and architecture. She and her colleague, Rachel, are helping the curator research tarot cards from the early Renaissance era. But Ann learns that there’s more than just visual art that makes the cards intriguing.

I really enjoyed the Cloisters, even though it was a slow build up. The main question put the reader is whether our fates are sealed or things happen by chance. The author (or main character, at least) seems to lean toward an unalterable future, with tarot cards and astrology being an insight into what it will be. I differ on this opinion, but the book was enjoyable nonetheless.
The main characters were complex and interesting, each one with positive and negative characteristics. In fact, I wasn’t very fond of the main character, Ann, by the end of the book, even though I felt empathy toward her situation. But despite not being the most likeable characters, their motivations and the conflicts they faced were believable. Ann’s relationships to each of the people in her life is intricate and meaningful to the story.

The whole atmosphere of the book is eerie. Hays uses the claustrophobic heat of summer in New York City to her advantage for this, giving Ann a reason to spend even more time in the coolness of the Cloisters. The surrounding of historical artifacts, manuscripts, and architecture adds to the overall dark academia feel. Add to that the occult theme of the characters’ work and the unhurried plot, and you’re overwhelmed with the expectation that something very dark is about to happen at any minute. The foreshadowing alone in the story was enough the keep me reading, but the author also kept just enough details from you to make you feel the need to get to the end and discover the full picture. I was genuinely surprised by the twists at the end.

Very atmospheric, with an ominous air hanging over every page. You can feel something is about to happen just around the next corner and eventually it does.½

This one was up and down for me. It's really a 3.5, but I rounded down because the ending went from a bit of turbulence to an emergency crash landing real fast. I loved the setting, all the art history, and I didn't even mind the pacing, which I've seen is probably most people's issue with the story. It is certainly a book that takes its time, but I also feel like that has a lot to do with the fact that it is less about the murder itself and more about the concept of fate vs free will and the slow-turning world of academia.
Where the book fell apart for me was narrative voice and ham-fisted handling of the themes. I didn't actively dislike our main character, but the slow unravelling into "unreliable narrator" territory felt more like she took a flying leap off a cliff into a cult-like belief in the unyielding hand of fate upon our lives and tarot's ability to intuit that fate. All can be explained, I think, by the fact that this is a debut novel, so I wanted to give it the benefit of the doubt and go for four stars. But the ending just really fell apart for me in epic proportions when this thoughtful academic romp turned into a bad tele novella.

“What if our whole life—how we live and die—has already been decided for us?”

So this book gave off the creepy ominous vibes pretty early on and I was in love. I always find that I enjoy the academia type stories more than I anticipated and this one having tarot cards as the focus was really cool. I think what I enjoyed most about this one was that even though it had this supernatural element... the motivations were all so normal. Ambition, love, betrayal, power, envy, anger all of them played a crucial role of the story and the unfolding of events. Ann is very much motivated by her desire to be an academic and Rachel becomes someone she clings to and trusts because of the power she radiates.

Ann is very skeptical of the importance that Patrick places on the tarot cards at first but I love how we gradually see her perception shift, almost to fit her motives. The book really highlights the stark contrast between the idea of fate and choice and I loved the way it did. I have to say that at times the book felt like it was dragging just a bit and I really wanted some action to happen. I was a little disappointed that the tarot cards weren't providing a bit more of an occult element but like I can forgive it because of the way things played out.

The book really saved all its shock for the end. I have to admit that I didn't see the ending coming and I truly loved the shock reveals we got. I enjoyed all the ways that ambition and obsession played out in this story. I love that it kept the creepy vibes going the whole time but I feel like some elements could have been explored a bit more. Overall though it was a really good read and now I am on the search for more stories with tarot cards at the center.

Ann Stilwell leaves Washington State hoping to be an art curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC. Instead, she is assigned to work for Patrick Roland at The Cloisters, a Gothic museum, alongside Rachel Mondray. Rachel quickly takes Ann under her wing, esp. after Ann discovers a 15th C artifact, a set of Tarot cards. Ann becomes very interested in reading Tarot. Ann also falls for Leo Bitburg, the Cloisters gardener, who has a secret.
When someone dies, the museum and the staff are all questioned. Ann questions everything she thought was real, and realizes that she doesn't really know those around her.

I thought this was a really unique mystery with a dark adecemdia twist. I think this book had a very small cast of characters and i did actually liked the characters which is rare of me. This book did have a alot of eleemts that captured me!! this mystery does have a open ending!!

I thought this was a really unique mystery with a dark adecemdia twist. I think this book had a very small cast of characters and i did actually liked the characters which is rare of me. This book did have a alot of eleemts that captured me!! this mystery does have a open ending!!

This book was advertised as a mix between "The Talented Mr. Ripley" and "The Secret History," two of my favorite books. It did NOT live up to that hype. The plot did not pick up until a bit more than halfway through, but many of the twists and turns were obvious (there were only about three characters, so I'm not saying I'm a great detective ). The main character was insufferably bland and dim. Interesting setting, but that's about all it had going for it.½

Not what I was expecting.... The mystery elements had flaws.

More coming in a full review!

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Very interesting, well-written!

Umm... this book was, well, quite fantastic!

Ann Stillwell, grieving over the unexpected loss of her dad, is desperate to leave her small town, Walla Walla, WA., and spend her summer in New York City as a curatorial associate at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. However, by fate or chance, she finds herself assigned to The Cloisters, a museum in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Upper Manhattan.

Eager to forget her past and reinvent herself, Ann immerses herself in tasks at the Cloisters and makes fast friends with her coworkers, Rachel and Leo. Ann quickly finds herself suffused in dark magic, poisonous brews, lust, and scandal.

This novel is captivating and disturbing in all the right ways. I was shocked by several twists and turns and had a lot of WHAT... I wasn't expecting that moments. I highly recommend this one. I listened to the audible version. Five stars!

audio fiction (10 hrs, 16min) - Ann, a young woman from small-town Walla Walla/Whitman College just wants to stay away from hometown memories of her late father and her widowed mother who struggles with resulting depression, so she jumps at the chance to work as a researcher at the curious, isolated Cloisters building of the Met collection. But something mysterious is going on there, possibly to do with medieval sorcery and divination-- And there is a strange but unmistakable sexual tension between... everybody...?

The audio version is an enjoyable enough distraction, though you probably won't want to take the unlikely characters and plot too seriously, and the ending drags a bit--by the time you get to the twisty reveals they aren't surprises anymore. The tarot parts lack charisma at first, but get better, and I did like the atmospheric descriptions of the Cloisters, though the fact that all the romantic relationships are male/female was maybe a tiny bit disappointing/unimaginative (and that all the action happens off-page makes this somewhat comparable to a Hallmark movie, I guess).½

In the beginning, I thought the book just needed a copy editor. By the end, I only finished it to be done with it! I will admit to surprise at the ending. No, not “the” surprise ending.

I bought The Cloisters by Katy Hays because of the museum and the use of tarot cards as part of the narrative. I have been learning about and using tarot cards for almost 30 years. I think I missed the fact that it was a psychological thriller. Not my usual fare but I ended up enjoying the book partially because of the setting of the Met's Cloisters in New York. Hays includes the wider city in the setting as well with its nooks and crannies and wealth and poverty sitting side by side. One speech towards the end reminded me a little of the ending of The Devil Wears Prada where Miranda Priestly insists that we always have choices and that Andrea, her assistant, really is just like her. That was the underlying theme of the whole novel: Hays plays with the idea of tarot cards being used for divination and whether characters want to know the future or not. I found myself wondering if Ann, the narrator, was reliable. She tells the truth, including a shocking past, but her actions make you consider whether she was completely trustworthy.½

Imagine an executive at the Hallmark Channel deciding that they want to make a movie version of a "dark academia" thriller, one sanitised enough to fit with their family-friendly fare, but on a budget so they can't afford to hire writers, just use ChatGPT.

That's the experience of reading The Cloisters.

Everything about this is lazy and hacky, a rote retread of a million other half-baked "thrillers" that fails to include any real characterisation, believable motivation, or suspense. Katy Hays' prose is often bad (sample chosen at random: "There were clusters of women in chic black pencil skirts, statement necklaces and bow ties, and various levels of studied deshabille." All at once?) and dialogue risible.

I kept going with this solely as a hate-read because I wanted to see how far someone who clearly knew better would go in conjuring up a fun-house mirror world version of academia/(art) history/palaeography/textual analysis/etc. The answer is: pretty far! I full on belly-laughed when the POV character, Ann, a working-class first-gen college kid, tells us about how her dead father learned a dozen ancient languages, like ancient Greek and medieval Ligurian, and then passed them on to her, in a manner like this:

“As a janitor, it had been my father’s job to go into the offices on campus in the evening and empty the trash cans. He always kept an eye out in the humanities and languages buildings for passages he could bring home and translate. Often, he would be late coming home from work because he had spent too long going through the paper waste of the tenured professors who thought nothing of throwing out material they had already incorporated into their research. But to my father, those discarded pages were his textbooks.”

What in the Good Will Hunting fuck? I'm not saying no one in a blue-collar job would be interested in learning ancient languages, but I am asking why they wouldn't just go to a library.

I'm also asking what humanities professors are just throwing out their research notes.

This is The Cloisters in a nutshell: people acting nonsensically in the service of an Aesthetic. Pfft.

I will grant that Hays' description of the Met Cloisters is accurate in terms of floor layout—I will grant her that! (Even though, in one of the most unfortunate editing slips I've seen in a while, she does state that the Cuxa Cloister was originally built in the 9th century BCE, which is a heck of a feat for a Christian monastery.) But despite the continual references she makes to various medieval artefacts that truly are in the galleries there, Hays shows no real grasp of the Middle Ages. (She describes the medieval Duchy of Ferrara as "libidinous and mystical"—what does that mean? It sounds vivid, I grant you, but what does it mean to describe a city state as lustful and spiritual?) I was unsurprised, when I dug around some to try to verify whether she really is a medievalist, that what academic work she's had published appears to be on modern France, not medieval Italy.

I was surprised, though, to pick up on something else.

While her author bio on the book jacket says that she "pursued her PhD" at UC Berkeley, and while in more than one past interview Hays has said she holds a PhD in Art History, there's no doctoral dissertation that I can find on record for her in the UC system under either her maiden or married name—but there is a CV available online which makes it clear that she left Berkeley in 2011 while ABD. In other words, Katy Hays has no doctorate.

Playing fast and loose with your educational record in order to boost your credibility and thus presumably your book sales? Now that is dark academia at its finest.½

Da Vinci Code for smart people. This book made me want to visit The Cloisters next time I'm in NYC. Ending somewhat unsatisfying. And nobody in this book ever seems to eat food.

While I appreciated learning about The Cloisters, something I had never heard of before, the plot of the novel wasn't very interesting. If I ever got to New York, I would love to visit The Cloisters, which sounds like an interesting museum that I would enjoy. The characters in the book for the most part weren't very likable; Ann and Rachel especially were obviously deeply disturbed. The author's descriptions of the setting were excellent, but the plot certainly dragged and got tiresome after a while. I didn't get into the whole tarot card part of the book and had a difficult time understanding the research that was being done. I wouldn't recommend the book, although I would suggest visiting The Cloisters if one gets a chance.½

Set in The Cloisters in NYC. Researchers are working on whether tarot cards were used for divination in the Renaissance. Interesting stuff about tarot, the Cloisters, and a surprise ending.

This is an enjoyable combination of mystery, occult, and relationships. The setting, The Cloisters Museum adds an eerie touch.

Dark½

Enjoyed reading this although didn’t really enjoy the characters but there were some twists and turns and it was interesting to read plus having gone to The Cloisters in NYC it was something I could imagine.

I was so looking forward to this title for its NYC/NYC museum vibe with a bit of academia/mystery/suspense thrown in. And what a lovely cover!

But, I got bogged down by the emphasis on tarot, on the various people pairings and the mystery and ending wasn't very satisfying to me: seems like things were spelled out and too easy to figure out.
I also didn't really like the morality of any of the main characters.

A quick read and enjoyable at times, but ultimately the narrative either telegraphs where it is going or relies on tarot fatalism to be read into every twist.

The Cloisters was a book that I thought sounded fantastic when I read the blurb. Even though I love reading crime and mystery books set in academia, this book just wasn't as wonderful as I expected. The story and the characters really didn't captivate me, but I kept on reading to find out how it would all end and it did provide an interesting twist.

The major problem I had with the story was that it was pretty obvious, there weren't enough twists. And, I just found Ann, the main character to be a pretty boring character. Isn't it so typical? I lost count of how many books I've read when the main character is the bland one with so many colourful characters around him or her. And, as the story progresses she starts to open up. Sometimes it works great, but not when it comes to this book. No, I just didn't like Ann that much to be honest. The Cloister was a so-so book in my opinion.

The protagonist and narrator of this novel is Ann Stilwell, a Renaissance scholar from a provincial college, who arrives in New York City eager to make her mark as a curatorial associate at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It seems she’s in for a massive disappointment, as the place is no longer available for her. However, she is unexpectedly snapped up by Patrick Roland, the curator of The Cloisters, a museum and garden which incorporates Gothic cloisters dismantled from Europe and rebuilt around herb gardens overlooking the Hudson River. Patrick and his glamorous research assistant Rachel are studying the history of tarot and the use of cards in divination in early Renaissance Italy. It quickly becomes evident that the “research” is not purely academic, but also involves actual dabbling in occultism using antique tarot decks. Ann is quickly drawn into this dark, elite, esoteric world. And like Fox Mulder in X-Files, she might have her own reasons for “wanting to believe”. After a murder at The Cloisters in which she is a potential suspect, Ann must navigate dangerous territory, seeking academic success while trying to save her skin and her reputation.

The Cloisters is an atmospheric read and, although some readers have criticized it as rather slow-moving, I actually found its mix of mystery and “occult thriller” quite gripping. Yes, The Secret History does come to mind, but so do, for instance, some of the “supernatural mystery” novels of Arturo Perez-Reverte. There is also a coming-of-age vibe in this story of a withdrawn student from the “backwaters” trying to make it big in the city. One sometimes needs to suspend disbelief – and, ironically, here I’m not referring to the more supernatural aspects of the novel but more to the triangular relationship which develops between Ann, Rachel and Patricki which, for some reason, did not particularly convince me. Yet this is a small quibble, and The Cloisters was a really enjoyable debut.

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