Item: Reviving the Hawthorn Sisters
Rating: 5.00
Author: bookanonjeff

by Emily Carpenter

The bestselling author of Burying the Honeysuckle Girls returns to uncover a faith healer’s elusive and haunted past.

Dove Jarrod was a renowned evangelist and faith healer. Only her granddaughter, Eve Candler, knows that Dove was a con artist. In the eight years since Dove’s death, Eve has maintained Dove’s charitable foundation—and her lies. But just as a documentary team wraps up a shoot about the miracle worker, Eve is assaulted by a vengeful stranger intent on exposing what could be Dove’s darkest secret: murder…

Tuscaloosa, 1934: a wily young orphan escapes the psychiatric hospital where she was born. When she joins the itinerant inspirational duo the Hawthorn Sisters, the road ahead is one of stirring new possibilities. And with an obsessive predator on her trail, one of untold dangers. For a young girl to survive, desperate choices must be made.

Now, to protect her family, Eve will join forces with the investigative filmmaker and one of Dove’s friends, risking everything to unravel the truth behind the accusations against her grandmother. But will the truth set her free or set her world on fire?

Don't Let 'Gothic' Scare You Here. I picked this book up on the strength of the publisher, Lake Union. But honestly, the marketing scared me a bit with the emphasis on calling this a 'gothic' book. When I think 'gothic', I think Edgar Allan Poe or perhaps fellow LU book The Companion by Kim Taylor Blakemore - period pieces set in the late 19th/ early 2oth century in old buildings.

This book... wasn't that. Yes, it uses an old-school sanitarium as the place of its beginnings - an orphan managed to escape there long ago, and in the present timeline, that orphan's granddaughter is now trying to redeem the building.

But really, the story here is told in dual timelines and features one woman just trying to survive in Great Depression/ WWII era Alabama, while the other woman tries to solve a mystery over the legacy of the first woman in modern day Alabama. In other words, standard-ish dual-timeline women's fiction - and really solidly written story that sucks you right in.

Growing up in the region in modern ish times, I could absolutely see much of this book playing out largely the way it did, the cultural touchpoints were truly spot on in both the period and modern touches.

Ultimately a strong work, and very much recommended.

Reviving the Hawthorn Sisters

by Emily Carpenter

Reviewed by Jeff Sexton on Oct 11, 2020

Reading updates