3.5 stars.

The writing in this book is beautiful and wonderful and poetic. The premise is interesting and weird and I really like weird books. There is a merging of reality with a not quite fully explained magical realism element as the protagonist slowly becomes merged with the mythological harpy. It was an intriguing book and I did like the read, but the execution just left me a little lacking and I wasn't able to be gripped by the movement of the story. I didn't connect well enough with the characters to really care what happened in the end.

The Harpy is a short novel with a fairly well-moving plot. Written from Lucy's point of view, the narration is fairly unreliable...a tactic that can either work wonderfully or fail miserably for me depending on the way it is executed. For me, I thought this actually worked well. She's a strange bird (pun slightly intended) from the beginning and boy does it just go downhill from there. Once Jake's affair is revealed, there is a fairly rapid progression of Lucy's mental decline and the book quickly began to feel primarily like something highly psychopathic. Again, not necessarily a bad thing, but in Lucy's case...it just didn't sit right for me.

Lucy was, in fact, probably my primary obstacle to REALLY enjoying this book. Her unreliability and, really unlikability, played fine for me, but she also didn't feel fully cohesive. This was a disorienting issue that pulled me out of the book a bit. It was like having two completely separate protagonists merged into one being. And while merging the original Lucy with the character of the harpy IS done, that is not what I'm referring to here. I'm talking about two completely separate characters, as if the book was written using two different (and somewhat oppositional) identities and then, rather than selecting one, the author just combined them.

One of these personalities was a sympathetic character going through a difficult life situation, infidelity. I could identify with this part of Lucy, and these portions of the plot flew by and pulled me in. There was some promise that there could be a progression through the issues and character development (or at least an interesting journey) along the way. The other half of Lucy was just fantastically unhappy in all ways and didn't seem to have a smidge of hope. Lucy appears to be overly unfulfilled and resentful from the beginning, which made it a little harder for me to connect with her emotions and her attempt to grapple with her husband's infidelity. Basically, she just felt like an unsavable trainwreck from the start. I didn't care about this part of her character as I didn't see her going anywhere and it ultimately removed my ability to be fully immersed in the plot. Had this portion of her been removed as an additional conflict, I think she would have been much more believable and relatable.

All that being said, this STILL was a decent read with fantastic writing. I wouldn't mind checking out more of Hunter's work in the future.

* Disclaimer: I received a copy of this novel from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. *