The Honeys by Ryan La Sala and House of Hollow by Krystal Sutherland are sister books; they are summer and winter respectively, and they both project a feeling that I’ve never been able to find in any other book. Organic and twisted, both of them offer stories about missing sisters, a sinister sort of flowery magic, and secrets that lie just under your skin and between old creaky floorboards.
(Image from Goodreads)
(Spoiler Free) Summary of House of Hollow
House of Hollow is about three girls that went missing and came back wrong. The Hollow sisters disappeared as children in a dark Scottish street and reappeared a month later, seemingly unharmed, but with no memories and bizarre changes to their appearance: blue eyes replaced with black voids and dark hair turned stark white. Changes which are waved away under the explanation of trauma. Iris, our main character, grows up knowing she and her older sisters are strange.
Our story takes place ten years after that initial disappearance, as Iris and her middle sister, Vivi, find out their older sister Grey, now known as a cryptic world renowned designer, has suddenly gone missing. Strange clues pop up as the two girls look for their missing sister. As Iris and Vivi unravel the mystery, their pasts come crawling out, promising an explanation that might be too disturbing to bear.
(Image from Goodreads)
(Spoiler Free) Summary of The Honeys
Mars and Caroline are twins. The pair was inseparable growing up, but as time went on, the two grew apart. Due to Mars’ gender fluidity, he is put in the shadows of his family’s traditions, always thrusting Caroline into the spotlight and driving a wedge between the twins.
When Caroline dies under horrifying circumstances, Mars decides to go back to the place she spent her last days: a prestigious summer camp by the name of Aspen Conservatory, a place he swore to never return to. Mars arrives on Aspen’s vibrant flower fields and seeks out Caroline’s friends, an ephemeral group of girls nicknamed “the Honeys.”
However, the longer Mars remains in Aspen, the more its carefully crafted facade begins to crack. Memories become hazy in the summer sun and, even among the endless flower fields and honeyed atmosphere, it eventually becomes clear that something is haunting Mars, and he must find it before it eats him alive.
On both books
(Disclaimer 1: We enter spoiler territory here for both books.
Disclaimer 2: Mars is only ever referred to within “The Honeys” using he/him pronouns so that is what I’ll be using to refer to him)
When I originally read House of Hollow, I left it wondering if I would ever read another book like it. Everything from the story to the writing style felt like it smelled of rotting flowers and moss on trees; it’s a book with a very distinct atmosphere and feel to it. To this day, the imagery it conjures remains fresh in my brain: small, corpse flowers blooming within the walls of an abandoned apartment, snow coating the dirt floor of a forest of dead trees. It’s a book that feels like winter and decay.
So, when I came across The Honeys this past summer, I got excited. The Honeys is a very different book to House of Hollow. While HoH feels older, like a fading scar or an object left in an attic for many years, The Honeys feels raw and pulsating—a fresh wound, harsh sunlight. It’s similar, but far from the same. Like I mentioned before, The Honeys feels like summer, it is fresh flowers and beehives, it’s secrets, kept under the floorboards of a sun bleached barn for far too long, being let out in a scream. It’s vibrant and alive despite its darkness.
This said, the imagery isn’t the only thing that carries these books. The sibling relationships are striking. Caroline and Grey, despite not being there for most of their respective stories, haunt the narrative. Caroline’s death is jarring and leaves a dark hole in her sibling’s life and both disappearances lead the remaining siblings into places and secrets that desperately want to stay in the dark. Grey’s disappearance sets her two sisters off into a dark, winding path that leads to a discovery, reviving knowledge that maybe should’ve stayed dead. Caroline’s death haunts the narrative in such a way that it almost feels like she’s there; Mars echoes her in everything he does, knowingly or unknowingly.
Even through all of this, sisterhood remains a driving force. The Hollow sisters have been bound for life by their experiences in that forgotten pocket of time when they went missing. This bond, much like Mars and Caroline’s, becomes strained and dissolves over time, but it is reignited by the circumstances. Caroline and Mars are two halves of a whole, and when Caroline dies, her friends and sisters in arms take Mars in. He is absorbed into their sisterhood, even if the outside world doesn’t seem to take well to Mars’ femininity. In a way, Mars then takes the role of Caroline, giving up his normal life to follow Caroline’s memory into a cursed place out of love.
Both books also tackle themes of the self, a self that’s been divided, and two selves that then become one. There’s the obvious part, with Mars and his identity as a genderfluid person living in a masculine body. This theme is a big part of the book as we see Mars face having masculinity being forced upon him time and time again by Aspen’s traditions and his peers. He takes solace in the Cabin H girls (the Honeys), who welcome him in as a fellow sister with open arms.
On the House of Hollow side, the theme runs far more subtle. Iris and her sister grapple with the fact they don’t know anything about what happened to them, but Grey does. There’s a gap in their memory, dividing their lives into before and after they went missing. Iris sees bugs crawling under her skin and flowers blooming out of wounds, and when she cuts herself, she sees a pale dead thing underneath the living vessel. She doesn’t know what she is, if she’s even human anymore.
If you’re just wearing someone else’s skin, but you don’t remember ever not being that person, would you still be that person? Is Iris still Iris after she finds her own corpse in a shallow grave, still a child when she’s been very much alive for the past 10 years? Such questions are left for the reader to wonder at the end of House of Hollow. The Honeys ends with a completely different dilemma, one similarly tied to identity. What happens when your sister dies in your place? What happens when you were the one who was supposed to be cursed? Caroline’s death leads Mars to the very place she was trying to keep him away from. It leads him into the shackles of a beehive and a fate he never really could escape.
At the end of the day, both books are bizarre, twisted stories. Fairy Tales about places that shouldn’t exist and cursed sibling bonds with a beating heart made up of that same bond persisting in the face of death and decay. While Mars takes up the place his sister died trying to keep him out of, a place he was always ultimately meant to occupy, Iris is living a life that was never meant to be hers, but she has been living so long in that role that she does not remember a time when she wasn’t.