Review--The Ravenous by Amy Lukavics

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