JessicaFirst to rec
“Dizzying, dripping, macabre and rich. Based on Catalan folklore, ghosts, demons and humanity indulge in basest instinct. Hedonistic and unflenching. Literary horror with an interesting lens on womanhood: daughters and mothers, seers and madwomen, the devout and heathens. For as brutally dark as this gets, it strangely doesn’t feel mean-spirited. There’s a sort of divinity woven through the debasement that feels like sympathy, if not forgiveness. We’re animals, after all.
So Bernadetta kept quiet. Because there are things that can’t be said. Because you can talk about misfortune, and you can talk about grief; you can talk about remorse and guilt, and about death, about evil and the things men do. The good things and the bad things. But you can’t say how a girl is made. There aren’t enough words to explain it, because you made her like dirt makes trees, and trees make branches, and branches make fruit, and fruit make seeds. In the dark. From a place so deep within you that you didn’t know you knew how to do it. (Page 142)
That said, I’d recommend this but with a huge content warning. The biggest.”
