Book Review: Dark Sisters by Kristi DeMeester

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“There is no light without the dark. They are sisters, born of the same mother.”

📚

Dark Sisters is a haunting tale of three women across three centuries, connected via grisly secrets, hidden histories, and an undying legacy of power, love, and fury. In 1750, healer Anne Bolton is accused of witchcraft and flees with her daughter to avoid persecution. Deep within the woods, she makes a protective bargain that inadvertently screams across generations. In 1953, ideal housewife and doting mother Mary Shephard embarks upon an illicit affair, defying the strict rules of her stifling society and risking everything she holds dear. In 2007, wayward teen Camilla Burson rebels against her preacher father, challenging convention, unearthing an ancient force, and throwing her surroundings into upheaval.

Pulsing with female rage, the alternating narrative establishes the sinister origin and repressive ethos of Hawthorne Spring, a small, wealthy, insular community with its own Christian church, The Path. Predicated on unattainable standards of feminine perfection upheld by men, it’s a rigid and unforgiving place where belief trumps sight and logic and women’s only purpose is beauty, marriage, and motherhood. Punishment is a tool meant to teach submissiveness, clarify expectations, and keep women in their predetermined roles and gilded cages, manufacturing good Christian wives and mothers who are temperate and acquiescent, gentle and modest, chaste and hospitable. Fear is a feminine yoke, as is the threat of an inexplicable, potentially deadly virus.

Rife with extreme and highly effective body horror, the storyline conjures a wonderful sense of escalating tension and despair, producing a devastating novel riddled with injustice and evil, vicious, greedy men. It’s a scathing account of twisted blessings and waking nightmares, sharp teeth and insatiable hunger, blind faith and forced reverence, and true nature and warped worship that explores guilt, shame, purity, and penance; distress, denial, betrayal, and vengeance; blood, wealth, knowledge, and abundance; darkness, death, violence, and trauma; choice, acceptance, atonement, and autonomy; conduits, vessels, roots, and visions; and offerings, rituals, curses, and bargains. A fierce and furious history that blazes a savage and compelling trail.

Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for providing an eARC of this forthcoming historical horror release (scheduled for publication on December 9, 2025) for review consideration. All opinions are my own.

❤Amanda

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