Burying the Honeysuckle Girls
Althea Bell is still heartbroken by her mother's tragic, premature death--and tormented by the last, frantic words she whispered into young Althea's ear: Wait for her. For the honeysuckle girl. She'll find you, I think, but if she doesn't, you find her.
Adrift ever since, Althea is now fresh out of rehab and returning to her family home in Mobile, Alabama, determined to reconnect with her estranged, ailing father. While Althea doesn't expect him, or her politically ambitious brother, to welcome her with open arms, she's not prepared for the chilling revelation of a grim, long-buried family secret. Fragile and desperate, Althea escapes with an old flame to uncover the truth about her lineage. Drawn deeper into her ancestors' lives, Althea begins to unearth their disturbing history...and the part she's meant to play in it.
Gripping and visceral, this unforgettable debut delves straight into the heart of dark family secrets and into one woman's emotional journey to save herself from a sinister inheritance.
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Community Reviews
This quick read broke my heart a couple of times with the sadness, trauma and pure anxiety within. This isn't a feel-good book, but I still found it compelling and hard to put down. The subject matter is pretty heavy, and you feel the weight of it on your shoulders as you wade through everything with the main character. At the start of the book, I didn't feel sorry for her, but it didn't take long for me to "switch sides" as it were and recognize that something else was going on.
**SPOILER ALERT**
One of the key takeaways for me is how quickly the power of a suggestion can infect a person. In this case, the suggestion of madness of schizophrenia that her family throws in her face really plagued the main character and in effect almost paralyzed her. For a while she (and yes me as a reader) thought she was losing her mind. That is rather frightening...
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