Krystal Sutherland is one of my favourite Young Adult authors, her previous books including Our Chemical Hearts and A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares, both of which have been made into, or been optioned for films. House of Hollow, a huge departure from her previous books, is a modern gothic fairy tale, full of dark beauty and mystery. This is not my usual genre but I’m enough of a fan of Sutherland that I was determined to read it and it had me entranced from the beginning.
The three Hollow sisters Grey, Vivi and Iris are strongly bonded and unique. As young children they disappeared into thin air off a street in Scotland on New Year’s Eve, only to reappear just as mysteriously one month later. They have no memory of the time they were gone and initially their parents are delighted at their return, but their father begins to notice changes in them and questions who is it that actually returned that night. Why were their eyes now black instead of blue and why had their dark hair turned white?
The sisters have an intoxicating and dangerous ability to influence people’s thoughts and emotions and are breathtakingly beautiful. Grey has become a supermodel but occasionally disappears for days at a time. Grey has disappeared again and Iris and Vivi find clues that she is in danger and begin the quest to bring her home. What follows is a journey through different realms, intertwining with each other, threats travelling through cracks between worlds, exposing secrets and horrors previously hidden.
The world Sutherland creates through her richly detailed narrative is real and disturbingly beautifully, full of natural and supernatural happenings. Fans of fantasy and the supernatural will be well satisfied with both the strongly developed characters and the intricacy of the plot, weaving between worlds.
Sutherland’s skill lies in writing beautiful characters so vivid they jump off the page and twists and turns to satisfy any mystery fan. If you’ve never read Sutherland but are a fan of fantasy and supernatural narratives, you are in for an absolute treat by discovering a strong new voice in the genre.
—House of Hollow by Krystal Sutherland (Penguin Books Australia) is out now.
House of Hollow
Iris Hollow and her two older sisters are unquestionably strange. Ever since they disappeared on a suburban street in Scotland as children only to return a month a later with no memory of what happened to them, odd, eerie occurrences seem to follow in their wake. And they're changing. First, their dark hair turned white. Then, their blue eyes slowly turned black. People find them disturbingly intoxicating, unbearably beautiful and inexplicably dangerous.
Now, ten years later, seventeen-year-old Iris Hollow is doing all she can to fit in and graduate high school...
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