They Drown Our Daughters
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"The best kind of story—one that will both break your heart and scare the hell out of you." —Jennifer McMahon, New York Times bestselling author of The Children on the Hill If you can hear the call of the water, It's already far too late. They say Cape Disappointment is haunted. That's why tourists used to flock there in droves. They'd visit the rocky shoreline under the old lighthouse's watchful eye and fish shells from the water as they pretended to spot dark shapes in the surf. Now the tourists are long gone, and when Meredith Strand and her young daughter return to Meredith's childhood home after an acrimonious split from her wife, the Cape seems more haunted by regret than any malevolent force. But her mother, suffering from early stages of Alzheimer's, is convinced the ghost stories are real. Not only is there something in the water, but it's watching them. Waiting for them. Reaching out to Meredith's daughter the way it has to every woman in their line for generations—and if Meredith isn't careful, all three women, bound by blood and heartbreak, will be lost one by one to the ocean's mournful call. Part queer modern gothic, part ghost story, They Drown Our Daughters explores the depths of motherhood, identity, and the lengths a woman will go to hold on to both.
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A dark family curse originated when two cousins disappeared from Cape Disappointment over a century ago. Ever since, the women of their bloodline loose themselves, in various terrifying ways, to the ocean. Now, Judith, Meredith and Alice want to put an end to it. But what lies in wait for them, in the darkness of the ocean?
While this is touted at a horror book, I never found it particularly scary. The beginning was the most disturbing part - and very effective. It was well - written, perhaps a little slow in parts, but ultimately kept me hooked.
Without giving too much away - for a book about ghosts haunting from the depths of the ocean, I was able to suspend my disbelief easily. However, there is a certain plot point (quite a major one) surrounding a dweller on an island that was just too far fetched for me. And we never really got an explanation about it.
Many thanks to NetGalley for this arc in exchange for an honest review.
They Drown Our Daughters by Katrina Monroe (audiobook read by Mara Wilson) is a haunting story of generational trauma, of mothers and daughters, told through the lens of supernatural horror. This novel weaves together multiple timelines in joined together by both location and blood, and does so more successfully than some other works that utilize the alternating timeline structure. Overall I found the story of Meredith and her daughter, Alice, and mother, Judith, in their town of Cape Disappointment (what a name, and it's a real place) to be anything but. Monroe did an excellent job of establishing setting in vivid detail and crafting lots of fascinating characters across different eras. I found some parts of the plot to be a bit muddy and the pacing too slow in some sections, but nevertheless this was an extremely enjoyable read. This is not, in my opinion, the kind of horror that will give readers nightmares, but rather a more literary and reflective book that manages to be both chilling and poignant. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
