#Spooktober ‘The Ravenous’ by Amy Lukavics

About the book…

From the outside, the Cane family looks like they have it all. A successful military father, a loving mother and five beautiful teenage daughters. But on the inside, life isn’t quite so idyllic: the Cane sisters can barely stand each other, their father is always away, and their neglectful mother struggles with addiction and depression.

When their youngest and most beloved sister, Rose, dies in a tragic accident, Mona Cane and her sisters are devastated. And when she is brought back from the dead, they are relieved. But soon they discover that Rose must eat human flesh to survive, and when their mother abandons them, the sisters will find out just how far they’ll go to keep their family together.

Published by Harlequin Teen, ‘The Ravenous’ is available in hardcover, e-book and paperback editions.

Amy does really interesting things with her female characters in the novels by her which I have read so far

She let’s you see through their eyes, what the lived experience of a young woman is, how they relate to each other (in this case as sisters) alongside the actual weight of expectation on them.

Here, the Cane family-deliberately named after an implement of punishment?-consist of 5 sisters, an un-moored mother and an absent father. He fulfils his societal role as a military man but this means he is rarely home, and is not anticipated back until another 7 months have gone by.

The mother is variously described by the daughters as a hypochondriac, depressed, and suffering from addiction. In the absence of a father figure and a reliable mother, these girls are parenting themselves.

The 2 older daughters, Juliet and Taylor form one dynamic, the younger 2 ,Mona and Alma another.

The youngest, Rose, is beloved of them all and the one they try to protect, and on her 12th birthday, her entry to being a teen, circumstances conspire to make her the fatal victim of a family row.

Traumatised and horrified, the girls allow their mother to bypass the normal way of reporting it. She finally has this chance to step up and be responsible.

What she does, however, is take Rose’s body and return some time later. Rose is alive, somehow unaware that she has died and has been told she was involved in a car accident.

Except Rose is not quite the same, loving girl she used to be. She has appetites for things she shouldn’t. And when their mother goes missing again, looking for the thing to make Rose truly herself , the sisters have to decided how far they will go to sustain her….

Full of moments of horror and dread , as they realise that they will need to step up to the mark to keep Rose going, this is about the bonds of sisters which transcend the death of one of them.

Gripping, with an unflinching perspective on addiction and grief, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

About the author…

Ever since she was little, Amy was especially intrigued by horror books and movies. Raised in a small mountain town in Arizona, she sustained herself on a steady diet of Goosebumps, Fear Street, and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books before discovering Stephen King in her mother’s bookshelf.

Amy lives with her husband, their two precious squidlings, and an old gentleman cat by the name of Frodo. When she isn’t writing, she enjoys cooking, crafting, and playing games across many platforms

Links-http://www.amylukavics.com/