readingmyreality 's review for:

We Can Never Leave by H.E. Edgmon

5.0

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Did you think you were reading a story about good but deeply damaged people surviving against all odds and finding hope for the future in each other? Because there are plenty of books telling that story, but this isn't one of them.

This is a book about haunted houses, except the houses are bodies and the hauntings are the lies children tell and are told. This is a book about how dangerous it can be to dream when you grow up sleeping with something under your bed. This is not a book about an exorcism, because these houses cannot be saved by anything short of burning to the ground.

This was incredible! The way the author writes works for me, I found it throughly engaging, lyrical with a terrible beauty. Got to the end a screamed a bit.

There are multiple POVs, flashbacks, a narrator (at time omniscient) and some 4th wall breaks. 

The book has a lot of dark themes around cults/religious trauma and abuse. There isn’t a hero and the ending is not happy.

So if that isn’t your thing you might not like this.

Gave me Annihilation, Lost, Sweet Tooth vibes with a bit of Wes Anderson.