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| A copy of this book was provided to me by the publisher in exchange for an honest review |
Author: Daisy Johnson
Release Date: 8.25.20
Publisher: Riverhead
Sisters July and September were born just ten months apart but are closer than twins. Dominant and controlling older sister September takes their special games like "Hide and Seek" and "September Says" to the extreme by constantly testing the limits of physical pain and cruelty. Drawn into their own world, the sisters don't fit in and don't care to fit in with their classmates. A school bullying situation leads to a suspension and an intended act of follow-up revenge, but what happens next is vague. Did the girls do something? Did something happen to them? Why is their mother taking them to live in their abandoned family home (the unsettling “Settle House”) on the Yorkshire moors? At the home the girls entanglement becomes even more disturbing and fractured. Add to the problem that their mother locks herself away in her bedroom, only coming out at night in order to avoid the girls.
As the youngest writer to be short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, Daisy Johnson's writing style is full of gothic/horror tropes and comparable to Shirley Jackson in that the horror lies in the anticipation and sense of unease. Questions are never fully answered, causing readers to keep flipping the pages in hopes of just one more clue. I had my suspicions from the beginning but couldn't quite put my finger on the twist until it was fully revealed. However, the reveal was not necessarily shocking. The art of this novel lives in the layers of storytelling and the passive descriptions of psychological unrest.
This book gave me serious flashbacks to 2015's The Ice Twins by S.K. Tremayne.
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