Olivia Foster hasn’t felt alive since her little brother drowned in the backyard pool three years ago. Then Kara Hallas moves in across the street with her mother and grandmother, and Olivia is immediately drawn to these three generations of women. Kara is particularly intoxicating, so much so that Olivia not only comes to accept Kara’s morbid habit of writing to men on death row, she helps her … her do it. They sign their letters as the Resurrection Girls.
But as Kara’s friendship pulls Olivia out of the dark fog she’s been living in, Olivia realizes that a different kind of darkness taints the otherwise lively Hallas women—an impulse that is strange, magical, and possibly deadly.
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This is a powerful book that is poignant, brings tears to the eyes and tells a tale that will reach a younger reader, all at the same time.
Already this author has been commended by others for the accurate portrayal of grief. I want to add something more to this.
The author does more than portray grief. Grief is portrayed in the complicated way that grief is. There is no one way a person is to grieve, and no person grieves the same way. Some choose to ignore the pain, some try to drown it in alcohol or cloud it with drugs. Some choose to try to believe it never happened. And for fun, those are but a few of the ways people try to deal. More fun is people are allowed to mix and match and do as many as there are minutes in a day.
The portrayal of the family dealing with Robby’s death was heart wrenching, painful, difficult to read at times, shocking, even offensive, but throughout simply honest.
Along with this important message is a story of teen angst, growth and relationship ennui not seen since Joey climbed out of Dawson’s room because Jen just moved in next door. There were times I thought this book reminded me of Dawson’s Creek, then of Charmed. Finally, I believe this book’s teen story line is Dawson’s Creek meets Charmed with Charmed having evil witches.
The book is a hard read but a very rewarding one. I can recommend it to anyone who has ever dealt with grief or knows someone who has been impacted by grief. Top it off it is also good for people who like the complications of teen romance.
My Rating: 5 stars
This book was the most heartbreaking read of 2019 for me. The author encompassed tragedy and grief in this story so well that you can’t help but feel like you’ve lost a little brother too. It was so evident for me very early on that the author knows grief and tragedy too well; halfway through the book I went to the author profile page and saw ForLoveofEvelyn.com, my heart broke even more. I want to say this was a beautiful story, Ava Morgyn; you translated Evelyn’s legacy and light, and created something beautiful.
Now onto the review!
This story is about the Foster family living as ghosts. Not literal ghosts, but like shells of people. Olivia Foster, at thirteen years old, finds her little brother dead, drowned in their backyard pool. Since then, nearly three years later, her family still has not properly grieved the loss. Her mother is a drug addict, her father is a workaholic who’s never home, and Olivia–Olivia buries herself in studies and solitude.
“I suppose this is what they mean when they say, “Life goes on.” But it’s no kind of life. And my parents and I hardly qualify as living. Something presses forward. Some motor that won’t stop running. Like automatons, we marched through an endless of parade of days. We drank coffee and got the mail. We went to your respective cells: the office, the boardroom, the school bus. We kept breathing and talking and eating and beating. But we stopped living the day Robby died. That’s the secret no one knows. No one outside of this house anyway. We all died that day, in the pool, in the yard. We were buried, and filled in, and covered up, and forgotten. We were lost. And we’ve been dead ever since.”
This was the Foster family. Until the Hallasses moved in across the road, and you meet Kara. Kara Hallas is very much the opposite of Olivia: where Olivia is empty, Kara is full. Where Olivia grieves and tries to bury death, Kara is obsessed with it. Kara has a knack for writing to serial killers and befriending them, like sort of a pen-pal situation… but with death row or lifers convicts.
“I am death’s daughter. She was murder’s daughter.”
This story, at the end of the day, is about how the Hallasses pull Olivia out grief’s shell. Out of death’s hands. If you’ve been through a tragedy such as Olivia has, I think you’ll really identify with her. She talks about the ways neighborhoods interact with those who have had the unthinkable happen to them. She talks about ways it leaves your soul empty.
There is a touch of supernatural in the story. It’s more or less alluded to, it’s not front row. I liked the little touch, it gave the book a mysterious, haunting vibe. I still have a lot of questions when it comes to the supernatural aspect of it, and I can’t tell if the author did this on purpose or not. Maybe it’s all part of the mystery, but I still wish she’d given just a little bit more information on the curse, because I don’t really understand it.
Overall I would 100% recommend this story. It’s dark, it’s a little creepy, it’s tragic, but there is also such bright lights in the story that it’s not totally depressing (if that makes sense?). I loved the contrast of Kara’s fullness to Olivia’s emptiness. I love watching Olivia come to terms with her brother’s death. I can tell the author poured a lot of herself in this book, and I think it turned out beautiful.
I give it 4.25 stars, because I’m dumb and can’t make up a mind for a rating. As I’ve mentioned, I think the supernatural aspect of it really needed to be addressed a little bit more. I feel disappointed that I don’t understand Sybil’s role in the story, but with how much she was mentioned I feel she had a big part in the events that I’m just not seeing? It’s those details that kind of leave me frustrated.
Nonetheless, pick up this book and read it; even if it’s just for the beautiful writing 🙂
“Nothing could take Robby from us. Not a pool. Not a fire. Not a man made of shadows bearing the kiss of death. My brother’s body, his duck hair and pudgy arms, his gummy smile and baby-boy smell–those were gone. And they would be missed and longed for every day that we drew breath. But the essence of Robby–his gentle ways, his joy, his truth–would always be ours. He would remain three years bright as dawn, starlit and flawless, a golden promise that finally came and went in perfect tempo.”