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Author: Krystal Sutherland
Series: n/a
Series #: n/a
Genre: horror
Age Group: young adult
ARC?: no

Seventeen-year-old Iris Hollow has always been strange. Something happened to her and her two older sisters when they were children, something they can’t quite remember but that left each of them with an identical half-moon scar at the base of their throats.

Iris has spent most of her teenage years trying to avoid the weirdness that sticks to her like tar. But when her eldest sister, Grey, goes missing under suspicious circumstances, Iris learns just how weird her life can get: horned men start shadowing her, a corpse falls out of her sister’s ceiling, and ugly, impossible memories start to twist their way to the forefront of her mind.

As Iris retraces Grey’s last known footsteps and follows the increasingly bizarre trail of breadcrumbs she left behind, it becomes apparent that the only way to save her sister is to decipher the mystery of what happened to them as children.

The closer Iris gets to the truth, the closer she comes to understanding that the answer is dark and dangerous – and that Grey has been keeping a terrible secret from her for years.

Review

I’ve recently started to like horror books more and more. Not if they’re more dystopian though, so when I saw the cover for this one I was very intrigued and curious. I waited quite a bit before I read it because I was so hesitant. I read Horrid last year and I liked it, but wasn’t blown away. This book and cover reminded me a bit of that. Therefore I was quite hesitant to go into this book. Now that I’ve read it I feel that it is the perfect spooky book for fall. There are a lot of spine-tingling aspects of this book that sent chills down my spine.

What about it was so good? Well, first off the writing was excellent. It was an easy to read book, and I felt that it brought a lot to the table in terms of writing. The atmosphere that Sutherland evoked was excellent. It kept you on the edge of your seat the whole time you were reading this book. I couldn’t stop turning the pages because I wanted to know what was going to happen next. In this way the pacing of the book was also so good. It was page turning for sure. Can I call this book Stephen King lite? It felt a bit like that to me. A tiny bit of gothic aspect also made me think Mexican Gothic. Anyways, as I said the whole theme of it was excellent. Or like TJ Kingfisher.

The plot had me guessing all the way through. I never would have guessed the ending it made my mouth pop open in surprise when I got to that part! I absolutely could not believe it!

I enjoyed the characters and the sisterly relationships as well, they were done well and made the book so much spookier. This book wasn’t heavy on romance at all which was nice. I felt like it made the book mostly about the sisters and their relationships with each other, rather than romances they had.

Family played a huge roll in this book as do other worlds. I felt that the aspects of family that were incorporated were interesting and heightened the tension in the books, between the sisters and the sisters and their mother.

 I highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys spooky page-turning reads and doesn’t mind a bit of mind-bending in the process.