e-ALC, 09:39:39
Narrated by: Jasmin Walker
Release Date: July 21, 2026
Published by: Recorded Books, Inc
Read from: July 22-23, 2026
Stand-alone
Source: Netgalley (I received this ALC for free from the publisher and Netgalley. I also received this ARC from ALA Conference. This did nothing to influence my review.)
Content Warning: Grief, Murder, Car Accident, Stalking, Racism, Slavery, Confinement, Abandonment
For Readers of: 2sLGBTQ+, ARC, Audio, Contemporary, Sparkly Cover, Paranormal, Racial/Ethnic Diversity, YANew from the author of Dead Girls Walking comes a YA horror about a girl kidnapped by a racist cult after investigating the supernatural happenings at her sister’s gravesite
A month ago, Junie Daniels was in a car crash that left her with a dead sister, fragmented memories of the accident, and a mother too checked-out to plan a funeral. The cheapest grave plot Junie can find is in the next town over. Sure, Williamsville is still proudly named after a slave master who was rumored to dabble in dark magic—but this North Carolina, after all.
When unexplained occurrences start happening at the graveyard, though, Junie and her best friend, Omari, investigate. And it’s not long before Junie and Omari are taken…
Williamsville wants both Daniels girls. But Junie will do anything to protect her sister—even if it’s only her corpse.
*MY THOUGHTS*
This was one of my most anticipated reads of the year because of the title itself. But unfortunately it didn’t hit the way I thought it would. It did have a cult and it did have the weird paranormal thing, but the pacing was off and it nuked it for me. I will DNF in the first couple pages and this was almost a thing for me here.
Ok so about the pacing…. The beginning was really slow. It took a minute before things started happening. She was just doing a bunch of lying to everyone. But it took forever for us to get to the meat of the story. When we finally got there, it was like everything happened at once. And stuff started happening all at the same time. It was a bit confusing. Like I would have much rather things happened throughout the book because I might not have gotten to the meat and potatoes of the book before I DNFed it. Does that make sense?
The cult thing was the best part of this. And let me just say as weird as it was, it had a lot of truth behind it I’m sure. I thought it was a really interesting way to portray history and to show the atrocities that happen and the way people have acted. This is also when the paranormal stuff started and I thought that was cool too. I don’t want to say too much about it because spoilers, but just know if you can make it through the beginning the rest of it is pretty cool.
The pacing of this got me lol I have been trying to write this review for a long time and I can’t say it any other way. I almost missed the part of this that was good. But I say y’all go pick this up and let me know what you think!
Overall, I give this
