House of Hollow

Review by Booklist Review

ldquo;Bring the key. Find the door. Save me. And if he comes for you--run." Grey, Vivi, and Iris Hollow have an unusual claim to fame. As children, they went missing for a month, disappearing right under their parents' noses from an Edinburgh street and returning naked, sans memories, to the same location. The mystery captivated the world, especially as the Hollow sisters grew up and became beautiful and strange, but it destroyed their family. After their father's suicide, Grey and Vivi left home, leaving Iris with their overprotective mother. Now Grey is a glamorous model and fashion designer, Vivi is a hard-partying rock star, and Iris, at 17, longs for a normal life, devoid of her sisters' bewitchments. When Grey disappears again, leaving a cryptic note hidden in her childhood bedroom, Iris and Vivi must confront their past to find her again--and they are not the only ones looking. Sutherland keeps this haunting, contemporary fairy tale poised on the edge of gorgeous and gruesome, with visceral descriptions of sensual yet menacing magic hidden in the everyday. Iris, the relatable sister, narrates, and her love for her sisters and her fierce will to save them makes the ending reveal particularly devastating. Hand this to your Nova Ren Suma and Melissa Albert fans or those captivated by Sarah Porter's Never-Contented Things (2019).

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Filled with evocative detail, Sutherland's (A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares) dark fantasy teems with eerie atmosphere and questions that have potentially undesirable answers. Iris Hollow, 17, is the youngest of three sisters, who "each black eyes and hair as white as milk." Ten years prior, Grey, the eldest, now a fashion icon and supermodel; musician Vivi; and quiet Iris disappeared without a trace for a month while with their parents in Scotland, only to return in exactly the same place. The girls who returned were different, with no memory of what happened, and each gifted with a strange power of influence. Now, with Grey missing and a mysterious bull-skulled man stalking their steps, Iris and Vivi must follow the scant clues Grey leaves behind in order to find her. Heavy topics, including parental alienation, suicide, feelings of isolation, substance use, and bullying, attend Sutherland's carefully crafted fantasy world. Readers who are both delighted by stories of the uncanny and are undeterred by detailed explorations of decay will find themselves enchanted. Ages 12--up. Agent: Catherine Drayton, Inkwell Management. (Apr.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by School Library Journal Review

Gr 9 Up--Snatched from an Edinburgh street as children, Grey, Vivi, and Iris Hollow disappeared without a trace for a full month before they miraculously returned, freezing and naked, in the very spot they were last seen. Not long after, their father spiraled deep into the delusion that his daughters were in fact not his daughters, his conviction so strong that it eventually drove him to suicide. Their dad's concerns were not entirely unfounded--the girls' eyes and hair changed, they retained no memory of the month they were gone, and they manifested otherworldly abilities that make them quite dangerous. Their mother copes better with their alterations, but after an explosive fight with Grey, the family falls apart. Grey and Vivi run off to pursue glamorous careers as a model/fashion designer and rock star respectively, while Iris enjoys a peaceful, overly protected life with their mom. That peace is shattered when Grey and Vivi plan a trip back home and Iris finds herself pulled back into the sway of their strange magic. Grey disappears yet again and the remaining Hollow sisters find themselves dodging a bull skull--wearing man who reeks of death as they work to recover their sister and uncover the mystery of their missing month. Readers may suspect where Sutherland is leading them, but will be eviscerated by the truth when they arrive. The girls have ethereal white skin, one is bisexual, and one is gay. VERDICT Alive with lush language and a dark fairy tale feel, this is a compelling readalike for lovers of Holly Black's many wonderful fair folk standalones and series.--Abby Bussen, Muskego P.L., WI

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Ten years ago, the three Hollow sisters disappeared from an Edinburgh street while on holiday. A month later, they came back. When Iris, Vivi, and Grey returned, they couldn't remember anything of their ordeal. Their dark hair turned white, and their blue eyes became black. They sported identical hook-shaped scars on their necks. Despite their altered appearances, their parents were elated to return home to London with them. However, their father soon began to believe that they were not really his daughters, a conviction that led to his suicide. Since then, the story of now 17-year-old Iris and her older sisters has been like catnip to online sleuths, and their ethereal beauty and uncanny ability to bend people to their wills and intoxicate them with dangerous desire add to their mystique. When Grey, now an internationally famous fashion designer and model, goes missing, Iris and Vivi, with help from Grey's Korean British boyfriend, Tyler, set out to find her and the truth behind their disappearance. Their search takes on a new urgency when they find a decomposing body blooming with white flowers in Grey's apartment and they are pursued by a murderous man wearing a horned bull's skull mask. Iris' smart and assured narration easily carries a fast-paced story entwining themes of grief and loss with elements of folklore and some very inventive body horror. The pervasive feeling of dread builds to a shocking twist. A lush and darkly twisted modern fairy tale. (Horror. 13-18) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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PROLOGUE I was ten years old the first time I realized I was strange. Around midnight, a woman dressed in white slipped through my bedroom window and cut off a lock of my hair with sewing scissors. I was awake the whole time, tracking her in the dark, so frozen by fear that I couldn't move, couldn't scream. I watched as she held the curl of my hair to her nose and inhaled. I watched as she put it on her tongue and closed her mouth and savored the taste for a few moments before swallowing. I watched as she bent over me and ran a fingertip along the hook-shaped scar at the base of my throat. It was only when she opened my door--bound for the bedrooms of my older sisters, with the scissors still held at her side-- that I finally screamed. My mother tackled her in the hall. My sisters helped hold her down. The woman was rough and rabid, thrashing against the three of them with a strength we'd later learn was fueled by amphetamines. She bit my mother. She headbutted my middle sister, Vivi, so hard in the face that her nose was crushed and both of her eye sockets were bruised for weeks. It was Grey, my eldest sister, who finally subdued her. When she thought my mother wasn't looking, she bent low over the wild woman's face and pressed her lips against her mouth. It was a soft kiss right out of a fairy tale, made gruesome by the fact that the woman's chin was slick with our mother's blood. For a moment, the air smelled sweet and wrong, a mixture of honey and something else, something rotten. Grey pulled back and held the woman's head in her hands, and then watched her, intently, waiting. My sister's eyes were so black, they looked like polished river stones. She was fourteen then, and already the most beautiful creature I could imagine. I wanted to peel the skin from her body and wear it draped over mine. The woman shuddered beneath Grey's touch and then just . . . stopped. By the time the police arrived, the woman's eyes were wide and faraway, her limbs so liquid she could no longer stand and had to be carried out, limp as a drunk, by three officers. I wonder if Grey already knew then what we were. *** The woman, the police would later tell us, had read about us on the internet and stalked us for several weeks before the break-in. We were famous for a bizarre thing that had happened to us three years earlier, when I was seven, a thing I couldn't remember and never thought about but that apparently intrigued many other people a great deal. I was keyed into our strangeness after that. I watched for it in the years that followed, saw it bloom around us in unexpected ways. There was the man who tried to pull Vivi into his car when she was fifteen because he thought she was an angel; she broke his jaw and knocked out two of his teeth. There was the teacher, the one Grey hated, who was fired after he pressed her against a wall and kissed her neck in front of her whole class. There was the pretty, popular girl who had bullied me, who stood in front of the entire school at assembly and silently began to shave her own head, tears streaming down her face as her dark locks fell in spools at her feet. When I found Grey's eyes through the sea of faces that day, she was staring at me. The bullying had been going on for months, but I'd only told my sisters about it the night before. Grey winked, then returned to the book she was reading, uninterested in the show. Vivi, always less subtle, had her feet up on the back of the chair in front of her and was grinning from ear to ear, her crooked nose wrinkled in delight. Dark, dangerous things happened around the Hollow sisters. We each had black eyes and hair as white as milk. We each had enchanting four-letter names: Grey, Vivi, Iris. We walked to school together. We ate lunch together. We walked home together. We didn't have friends, because we didn't need them. We moved through the corridors like sharks, the other little fish parting around us, whispering behind our backs. Everyone knew who we were. Everyone had heard our story. Everyone had their own theory about what had happened to us. My sisters used this to their advantage. They were very good at cultivating their own mystery like gardeners, coaxing the heady intrigue that ripened around them into the shape of their choosing. I simply followed in their wake, quiet and studious, always embarrassed by the attention. Strangeness only bred strangeness, and it felt dangerous to tempt fate, to invite in the darkness that seemed already naturally drawn to us. It didn't occur to me that my sisters would leave school long before I did, until it actually happened. School hadn't suited either of them. Grey was blisteringly smart but never found anything in the curriculum particularly to her liking. If a class called for her to read and analyze Jane Eyre , she might instead decide Dante's Inferno was more interesting and write her essay on that. If an art class called for her to sketch a realistic self-portrait, she might instead draw a sunken-eyed monster with blood on its hands. Some teachers loved this; most did not, and before she dropped out, Grey only ever managed mediocre grades. If this bothered her, she never showed it, drifting through classes with the sureness of a person who had been told her future by a clairvoyant and had liked what she'd heard. Vivi preferred to cut school as frequently as possible, which relieved the administration, since she was a handful when she did show up. She back-talked teachers, cut slashes in her uniforms to make them more punk, spray-painted graffiti in the bathrooms, and refused to remove her many piercings. The few assignments she handed in during her last year all scored easy As--there just weren't enough of them to keep her enrolled. Which suited Vivi just fine. Every rock star needed an origin story, and getting kicked out of your £30,000-per-year high school was as good a place to start as any. They were both like that even then, both already in possession of an alchemical self-confidence that belonged to much older humans. They didn't care what other people thought of them. They didn't care what other people thought was cool (which, of course, made them unbearably cool). They left school--and home--within weeks of each other. Grey was seventeen; Vivi was fifteen. They set off into the world, both bound for the glamorous, exotic futures they'd always known they were destined for. Which is how I found myself alone, the only Hollow left, still struggling to thrive in the long shadows they left behind. The quiet, bright one who loved science and geography and had a natural flair for mathematics. The one who wanted desperately, above all else, to be unremarkable. Slowly, month by month, year by year, the strangeness that swelled around my sisters began to recede, and for a good long while, my life was what I'd craved ever since I'd seen Grey sedate an intruder with a simple kiss: normal. It was, of course, not to last. Excerpted from House of Hollow by Krystal Sutherland All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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