From the outside, the
Cane family looks like they have it all. A successful military father, a
loving mother and five beautiful teenage daughters. But on the inside,
life isn't quite so idyllic: the Cane sisters can barely stand each
other, their father is always away, and their neglectful mother
struggles with addiction and depression.
When their youngest and
most beloved sister, Rose, dies in a tragic accident, Mona Cane and her
sisters are devastated. And when she is brought back from the dead,
they are relieved. But soon they discover that Rose must eat human flesh
to survive, and when their mother abandons them, the sisters will find
out just how far they'll go to keep their family together.
Well, I finished yet another spooky read just
before the Halloween season comes to an end! I picked up yet another TBR
book I’ve had sitting for too long and this time it was
The Ravenous by Amy Lukavics! Amy has written some pretty
creepy books before and decided to give this one a try and it was
downright chilling, but not in all the ways you would think.
Mona is one of five sisters in her family, she’s
the second to youngest and her family is a bit dysfunctional. Her father
is a colonel in the army and is always away, while Mona and her sisters
are left with their drunken mother. Their
mother has never really been present in their lives lately and it was
up to Juliet, the oldest to help take care of everyone, except Juliet
isn’t exactly what you would call the loving big sister.
Then on her youngest sister, Rose’s birthday,
tragedy strikes and Rose dies. Her mother in a somewhat lucid state
frantically takes Rose’s body away, leaving everyone sobbing and upset
at home. When she returns, Rose is alive, but changed.
She insists that Rose will be fine and back to normal, just as soon as
she gets her “medicine.”
You can naturally assume where things are headed at
this point. While Rose does start to feel better after having her first
dose of medicine, it doesn’t last long and soon she’s hungry and
nothing can stay down in her stomach. Their mother
frantically leaves the house, mumbling nonsense to herself, once again
leaving her children all on their own.
Well, at this point, the girls discover that the
medicine was in fact human flesh and since that’s the only thing Rose
can eat, that’s exactly what they will feed her. Juliet takes charge on
how exactly this will play out and this my friends,
is where things take an even darker turn.
Juliet is one scary sister. She’s horrible to
everyone but Rose. She practically raised Rose herself since their
mother checked out on them shortly after her birth. Instead of going off
to college Juliet stayed home to tend to Rose…and
her other sisters. Taylor, the second oldest, was Juliet’s
shadow/yes-man. Whatever Juliet said or did, Taylor did too. That leaves
Mona and Anya as the middle men, yet they aren’t as close as they once
were either. But man, Juliet is downright abusive to
her sisters. If it’s not a smack or two here, it’s a vicious series of
verbal abuse. It was almost hard to read because it was just so dark and
dare I say, damaging? Mona ends up developing a drinking problem, which
coming from a fifteen-year-old was also
terrifying.
You can slowly see where things are headed towards
the end, and that too was pretty terrifying. So yeah, a perfect
Halloween read! The aftermath of the ending itself was also just a
little eerie, it’s one of those endings where you wonder
if things are truly over or not. I mean, it is also a perfect way to
end a horror novel, but dannnnng! While I could’ve done without some of
the sisterly abuse that was happening on a daily basis and pretty much
Juliet as a whole…though she was the driving
force of the sister’s actions and thus the story at large…this was
still a pretty entertaining novel. I didn’t care for some bits here and
there, ones that just rubbed me the wrong way, but the horror aspects
were spot on!
The Ravenous will make for a perfect
Halloween read if you’re looking for something that is truly disturbing
on a series of levels and might have you looking at your siblings a bit
differently. Highly recommended for the only child!
Lol.
Overall Rating 3.5/5 stars
