House of Hollow
House of Hollow
By: Krystal Sutherland
[Nominated for ‘Best YA Fantasy’ category of the 2021 Goodreads Choice Awards Reading Challenge]
“Dark, dangerous things happened around the Hollow sisters.”
Iris and her two sisters, Grey and Vivi, are strange.
They have been… ever since that thing that happened to them when Iris was seven. It left all three of them white-haired, black-eyed, and insatiably hungry.
Their bond is deep.
“Grey was lightning, Vivi was thunder, and I was the sea in a tempest.”
And they all have a special ability to make other people do what they want them to do.
[If you like this concept of ‘magical power’ you should check out Tosca Lee’s duology The Progeny/Firstborn!]
The ‘incident’ has created a strained relationship between Grey and Vivi and their mother, Cate, causing them to leave home before high school was over and make their way on their own. Iris has remained loyal to Cate.
But Iris’s world comes to a crashing halt when Grey disappears. Her and Vivi know that Grey is in danger and they must find her.
“Grey was the grounding force in our sisterhood, the sun we both orbited around. What would Vivi and I be without her? Would we drift apart in the cavernous space Grey left behind, rogue planets spun out into the abyss?”
Their journey to save their sister will expose truths that they aren’t ready to deal with. And the truth about what happened to them in their missing memories.
Disclaimers
House of Hollow is fantasy and a bit of horror. I’m not sure if I’ve ever read a horror book so I’m not sure how to evaluate its components.
It’s not super gruesome but there is a lot of talk of decay and death. In fact, the sisters have a weird, I guess, odor? about them that smells like rotting nature. Sometimes characters have moss and carrion flowers (which are corpse flowers because they smell like death) growing from their wounds or in their throats. There are also corpses with the same growths.
The community kind of views the sisters as witches or witch-esque. And one of the characters uses runes, potions, and palm readings.
In this book we discover The Halfway which is similar to The Upside Down in Stranger Things. Things there are all in various stages of death and decay and such. If you don’t want descriptions of that, you may not way to read this book.
Another disclaimer, depending how you feel about reading books with LGBTQ characters, Grey is presented as straight, Vivi lesbian, and Iris bisexual. These characteristics don’t really play major roles, but some comments are made.
I thought the way they employed their power was a little weird. They put their fingers in the person’s mouth or kiss them and then the person becomes ‘in love’ with them, flirty, or obsessed with them. It really isn’t a sexual encounter or anything but it is strange and I wish the author would have chosen a different method.
However, there is a big theme of beauty and the curse of beauty. So in some ways this provides the girls with a way to have the power instead of being the vulnerable parties.
There are some f-words.
Thoughts
I really like the title. Once you finish the book you’ll understand the profound meaning of it!
One of my favorite quotes in the book was this:
“We once spent an entire month seeing who could take the most hideous sleeping pictures of the others.”
My grandma would always be appalled at me and my siblings/cousins when we would try to take pictures with weird faces- “Are you trying to be ugly?!”
And I’m very disappointed that we never thought about trying to take sleeping pictures of each other because this sounds fantastic. Well done, Hollow sisters, well done.
I mentioned before that there was a theme of beauty throughout this book. However, I feel like Sutherland tried to do too much with it. There were two very different threads that after finishing the book seemed disjointed, one being out of place.
The thread that I liked revolves around this quote:
“The purple otherworldly petals of the monkshood flower concealed poison that could deliver instant death. Poison dart frogs were pretty as jewels— and one gram of the toxin that coated their skin could kill thousands of humans. Extreme beauty meant danger. Extreme beauty meant death.”
This fits the story. The Hollow sisters are beautiful but how is their beauty dangerous and equivalent with death? It creates ominous mystery and cleverly connects it to nature which is a central tenet of this book as well.
However, Sutherland tries to connect it with sexual harassment and abuse.
“Grey went to the places and wore the things that— if anything happened to her— would later prompt people to say she was asking for it.”
“Vivi collected each wolf whistle, each smacked butt cheek, each groped breast, kept them all beneath her skin where they boiled in a cauldron of rage that she let out onstage in the strings of her bass guitar.”
I understand that Sutherland is saying it’s dangerous to be beautiful because it draws unwanted attention from dangerous people who want to take advantage. But after reading the story all the way to the end, this feels like a random rabbit trail to include. There is no real resolution or end message to this and almost the contrary, in my opinion. By the end of the book it seems quite irrelevant.
Conclusion
I’m not really a fan of horror, but I was still able to enjoy this book. It’s maybe more fantasy than horror. It’s not a book that will keep you up at night. It’s not a slasher story and doesn’t have really grotesque or demonic characters. Maybe that’s not even what horror books are normally like— I don’t know! Haha.
I don’t think this book is for everyone. (Mom- you won’t want to read this one) But if you enjoy fantasy or horror, I think you will.
If you’re like me and you don’t really like horror but you can handle some weirdness, I feel like the mystery was pretty compelling. And the ending is good. It’s weird to say that because of what it is.. but it’s good in the sense that it is surprising and bold.
This book will give you mixed emotions but I thought it was an intriguing plot and the writing was suspenseful.
[Keep scrolling for some SPOILER thoughts…]
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SPOILERS!!!!
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Okay, here are some things I’m going to talk about. I was explaining this story to my husband and we got to the ending and his first comment was: “Skin isn’t what makes you look like you.”
So here’s a plot hole (which we can ignore for the sake of the story)— the whole skinning someone and then re-sewing their skin that another person puts on— very Silence of the Lambs— is pretty far-fetched. How would one even do this? So maybe she used magic to skin them in one piece… but then if she has magic why can’t she create a suit without a moon-shaped ‘seam’?
And as stated before, a person’s ‘look’ is not really their skin. It’s bone size and structure, muscles, jawline, shape of the eyes and nose, etc. Otherwise, anyone could just put on someone’s skin and instantly look like them? And what about their voice?
So the concept is clever and surprising but the execution (no pun intended) is implausible.
Plus… Iris eventually discovers when she gets cut that there is a second layer of skin under her skin. SO you’re telling me after ten years she has never gotten a cut and noticed this before? No doctor has ever noticed there was a second layer?
Also this whole ‘earthy’ smell thing? It must be some sort of magical thing where to ‘normal’ people it must smell intoxicating but to each other it doesn’t? Seems like they would all reek.
Anyway. Just some random ramblings about plausibility that don’t really matter.
Carry on.
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