It’s messy and chaotic and it made me cry, but that’s family for you. 

Listen to Your Sister isn’t a book I’d normally go out of my way to read, because I tend to like reading about topics I’ve been traumatized by and my relationship with my little brother is one of the most positive things in my life. I read to escape 90% of the time. So a book about an eldest sister’s fraught relationship with her two younger brothers isn’t usually my vibe but the buzz around it was so loud I decided to give it a try. 

I’m not saying it’s perfect. Some of it went over my head and the third act did get a little messy here and there, but this is an utterly fantastic family drama cast through a sharp horror lens with lovely literary prose in the narrative that gives the whole story an epic, hypnagogic feel. 

Calla, Dre, and Jamie are characters I found myself loving to hate and hating to love in equal measure throughout the book. That’s another way of saying they came across as…human. I have never and will never review a book with a POC cast by a POC author and assess the family, culture or dynamics within because I’m as white as white can be, but I can say every negative emotion at play in this book seems more than equal to the trauma both inflicted and feared. 

Trauma lives on in the DNA, and these siblings share a whole pool of it. If you’re a fan of debut authors, supernatural horror, psychological fiction, family drama, and horror written with literary prose I highly recommend it. 

I was provided a copy of this title by the author and the SMP Early Readers Program via Netgalley. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.

File Under: 5 Stars Review/Body Horror/Horror/OwnVoices/Psychological Thriller/Supernatural Thriller