I somehow missed this book when it first came out, but I'm so glad I found it now. I definitely did not see them coming, and it was great fun to partake in the journey and be thoroughly surprised. I loved the way the story unfolded, with lots of little clues and happenings, all building up to a spectacular set of twists and turns. I felt transported and I couldn't look away.

But this book fully embraces the magic, and it totally works. The last few books I've read have been so flat and dull, almost as if the authors themselves don't even buy into the magical world they've created. I think it's because I keep getting burned by the genre. I've been a bit biased lately against books labeled as magical realism. Rather, I want that perfect balance where a story is actually chilling, but it's also so much fun that I just want more.

Nor am I hoping to be so freaked out that I won't sleep for a week and have to check every dark corner for fear of monsters. I should clarify-when I'm looking for a creepy read, I'm not aiming to have the bejeezus scared out of me. I haven't had this much fun with a creepy read in a long time. But this book elicited all the reactions. I feel like so many books advertise as atmospheric, yet hardly any of them actually deliver. Right from the get-go, this story drew me in. And to save her, Iris must revisit her childhood and figure out what really happened all those years ago. But when her oldest sister disappears again, it's as if history is repeating itself. Now 10 years later, Iris just wants to leave it all behind and move on with her life. When Iris Hollow was seven years old, she and her sisters disappeared for a month, only to reappear with no memories of where they've been or what had happened to them.

It'll set you free, right?'Calling all fans of dark fairy tales. 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. 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.Īs 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. Iris has spent most of her teenage years trying to avoid the weirdness that sticks to her like tar. 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. Seventeen-year-old Iris Hollow has always been strange.

The hollow sisters book