Delicious monsters

Review by Booklist Review

On the heels of her boyfriend's betrayal, Daisy and her mom get a long-awaited call: they've inherited the "Miracle Mansion" of Daisy's mother's teenage summers and can finally move out of Toronto to start an Airbnb. In a parallel story line set 10 years in the future, podcast host Brittney and her partner Jayden investigate the same mansion for an episode in the newest season of their ghost-story YouTube show. As Daisy contends with her ability to see ghosts and all the things her mom isn't telling her, Brittney and Jayden unravel Daisy's story from the end, until the two narratives collide in a haunting revelation. This complex, multifaceted story is not for the faint of heart; its 500-plus pages are packed with visions of dead people and different types of abuse. The deeply creepy mansion delicately ties together two main characters who, despite being separated by 10 years and having very different backgrounds, are both fierce and compellingly imperfect, though one is perhaps less reliable than the other. A must-read.

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

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Via dual perspectives told a decade apart, two Black teens strive to uncover the secrets of a haunted house in this gripping psychological thriller by Sambury (Blood Like Fate). The house that 17-year-old Daisy's late uncle left to her and her mother seemed to represent an answer to the family's financial struggles, an escape from Daisy's persistent visions of macabre ghosts, and a fresh start from her physically and emotionally abusive 21-year-old boyfriend, who recently dumped her without warning. But there is something sinister about their new home, and Daisy's mother seems to know more about it than she's letting on before tragedy strikes. Ten years later, the house is an AirBnB with a cult following that was spearheaded by college student Brittney's emotionally abusive bestselling author mother, who claims her stay at the house--dubbed the Miracle Mansion--"changed her for the better." But Brittney wants to expose it for the "house of horrors" she believes it is by uncovering its history for her investigative web show, Haunted. Using speculative elements to cultivate genuinely terrifying scares whose perpetrators straddle the line between imagined and real-life monsters, Sambury empathetically highlights cycles of abuse, depression, and generational trauma. Ages 14--up. Agent: Kristy Hunter, Knight Agency. (Feb.)

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Review by School Library Journal Review

Gr 10 Up--Seventeen-year-old Daisy, with ancestors from Trinidad and Tobago, has always been able to see dead people, but when she moves from Toronto into an inherited mansion with her mom, the ghosts inside invade her life in a completely new way. Daisy is hoping the fresh start will be a chance to put her most recent toxic relationship with an older man behind her, but instead she is thrust into a haunted house with a monstrous will of its own. The house feels like an evil character from a Stephen King novel, though the true villains in this story are more likely to use their power to groom, rape, and gaslight their teenage victims. Readers wary of maggots and slaughtered animals should also be prepared for some of the vivid imagery present. Because the house leaves a dead Black girl in its wake, a decade later the creative team behind a popular haunted house web series decides they will investigate to shine a light on the lack of concern over "Forgotten Black Girls." Even with the large cast of characters and dual narratives, Sambury carefully and clearly builds an intricate story that uses metaphors of gardening to spotlight the cyclical nature of sexual violence while providing a genuinely terrifying haunted house ghost story. VERDICT An excellent choice for fans of sophisticated horror that includes both paranormal and real-life terrors, such as Elana K. Arnold's Red Hood.--Carrie Shaurette

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A haunted mansion is the site of unmistakable horrors and horrific mistakes. Seventeen-year-old Daisy Odlin recounts constantly seeing, feeling, and fearing the dead; visions of the dead lying atop her are paired with memories of an abusive 21-year-old ex-boyfriend, betraying an unrelenting sadness that Daisy theorizes the dead feed on. With an estranged father and a volatile relationship with her mother, Daisy, whose family has origins in Trinidad and Tobago, doesn't resist when an opportunity arises for mother and daughter to leave Toronto for northern Ontario and an inherited home. A decade later, Black film student Brittney is investigating what actually happened to Daisy, her mother, and the notoriously deadly house for the web series Haunted. Brittney's own abusive mother was a guest there after Daisy's mother turned it into an Airbnb, and it was a positive turning point that she wrote about in a bestselling memoir that put the so-called Miracle Mansion on the map. In parallel narratives, Brittney and Daisy--with the help of a documentary filmmaker and psychic, respectively--seek truths while struggling with the realities of their respective mothers. The paranormal logistics are complex, and while Daisy is at the center of it all, Brittney's investigation cuts through to discover layers upon layers of trauma that imbue the house with its supposed supernatural, if not psychological, power. As the saying goes, haunted people haunt people. A story that is careful to make its ghosts and monsters painfully real. (author's note, content warnings) (Thriller. 14-18) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Chapter One: Daisy CHAPTER ONE DAISY There were two stories of how I was named. One was what Mom told people. Never casually. Only if they asked. It was a dream of a drive long enough that you strain not to doze off, mingled with the extra-sweet tang of wild blueberries. All of Ontario seemed to be built along rough gray roads stretching seemingly forever into the distance, where rolling down your window meant breathing in the sharp smell of burned rubber and stinging asphalt. The sort of tar-black road that scorched your feet with its heat and left the scent on your heels, smoky and stained, lingering in the air. In this dream, Mom pulled onto the shoulder, bright emergency blinkers flashing on an empty highway. When I was little, growing up in a city, it was hard to picture a place I knew to be packed and busy, suddenly devoid. Like a ghost town. Abandoned . With Mom as its only inhabitant. She stepped over the squat metal barrier between expressway and earth, careful with the swollen bump of her belly. She walked into the wreckage of fallen trees, burnt branches crumbling to white ash that stuck to her fingers and still smelled of fire. That's where she found the blueberries. They grew in patches, short, small, and wild, alive in a field of death. You could find the best blueberries after a burn, she'd say. And there, in the midst of gathering the sweet fruit into the hem of her car-sweaty T-shirt, her tongue stained purple with juice, she found something else. A daisy. Inexplicably. In a place where only one plant seemed to grow was this other thing that shouldn't have survived. That was where my name came from. Now, the second story. The one where Grandma whispered that of course a sixteen-year-old would name her kid after a flower. Which meant that the second story wasn't a story at all. Because that was the point, that there wasn't one. That my name was nothing more than a pretty tattoo: permanent and meaningless. Excerpted from Delicious Monsters by Liselle Sambury 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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