Forgotten Sisters combines true crime, suspense, historical fiction, fairy tales, and supernatural horror to deliver a ghostly tale of two sisters with a past.
What’s Forgotten Sisters about?
The Forgotten Sisters follows Anna and Jennie Arbor, who live in an historic and ghost-filled house on the Chicago River. Anna hosts her own spooky podcast, while Jennie fixes antique musical instruments. Neither young woman leaves the house much.
When Anna pursues a romance with a podcast listener, Jennie goes a lil’ nuts about Anna trying to get a life of her own and move on from the tragic history that plagues her family. Meanwhile, dead bodies are turning up in the Chicago River near Anna and Jennie’s home, and soon the sisters are wrapped up with the Chicago police, who are tracking down a serial killer.
Forgotten Sisters is a trippy haunted house novel.
Author Cynthia Pelayo does a great job of making the reader feel unsettled and uneasy by making everything in Anna and Jennie’s world just a little bit off. A lot of this comes from the dialogue between the sisters, which is often stilted and formal. Their speech patterns don’t correspond with how contemporary women in their early 20s would talk.
Couple that with the haunted house the sisters live in, and reading Forgotten Sisters is like wading through a dream world. Everything has a hazy, surreal quality to it. You know you’re still grounded in some kind of reality, but Pelayo purposely hides that reality behind a gauzy curtain of uncertainty.
For a good portion of Forgotten Sisters, you’re not sure what’s going on with the sisters Arbor, but you know that they’re obsessed with three things:
- water – they talk about it all the time
- never being loved — they don’t want to die without finding true love
- the The Little Mermaid — The real fairy tale by Hans Christian Anderson, not the gritty, dark, not-so-Disney Princess version.
About halfway through Forgotten Sisters, everything starts to twist into focus. The dream state starts to slip and the cracks in reality — and sanity — begin to show.
Sisters. Sisters. There were never such devoted sisters…
First of all, bonus points if you know where that heading quote is from. *thumbs up*
Let’s talk about the “forgotten sisters,” Anna and Jennie. Jennie’s clearly a little… eccentric, shall we say? Apart from the fact that she’s a huge drama queen, something’s definitely not right with her. Anything that comes from Jennie’s mouth doesn’t make a lot of sense, and she yammers on a lot about her fears of being alone and/or never finding love.
Anna seems relatively normal, if a little repressed. It’s not until Jennie starts verbally attacking her sister for dating that you realize something may be off with Anna, too.
The more I read, the more curious I became. I really wanted to know what the deal was with these sisters.
How scary is Forgotten Sisters?
Anna and Jennie definitely live in a haunted house. There’s no question about that; creepy, weird shit happens there on the regular. Ghost women run down hallways. Spirit waterfalls pour over the stairs. Footsteps, moans, and groans fill the house. Say it with me: “The house is alive, aliiiiive!”
However, the “haunting” aspect of Forgotten Sisters isn’t very scary. Maybe I’m just desensitized to ghostly activity. But, I think it’s due to the fact that a lot of the haunted house stuff happens in that dream state I mentioned. Just like Anna and Jennie, you’re not sure how real everything is.
What truly scared me in this novel is 1) there’s a serial killer on the loose, 2) Jennie’s temper tantrums anytime Anna suggests doing something completely normal. People are scarier than ghosts.
Should you read Forgotten Sisters?
Although Forgotten Sisters wasn’t my favorite haunted house story ever, it definitely kept me intrigued and turning the pages. However, I would classify this atmospheric novel as “suspense” rather than horror, despite the ghostly elements in the story.
If you’re a fan of historical fiction, I think you’ll really like Forgotten Sisters. Anna delves into so much Chicago history, particularly the nefarious and often overlooked parts about immigrant populations, the police, waterways, and so much more. I learned a lot about Chicago from this book.
Finally, if you’re into police procedurals like Raven Black, you’ll enjoy the true crime plotline woven into the story. It involves an about-to-retire homicide detective and the rookie he’s training, and the way they talk about how many dead bodies are found in Chicago each year seriously made me rethink any plans I have to visit the Second City anytime soon. Yipes.
What’s the book-inspired recipe for Forgotten Sisters?
Stay tuned for the book-inspired recipe for Forgotten Sisters: Baked Sea Scallops with Lemon Spinach Basmati Rice.
Although I received a complimentary advance copy of Forgotten Sisters from Kaye Publicity, all opinions expressed in this review are my own, and I was not compensated in any way for this review or for any other promotion/publicity I’ve done related to this book.
