When I read the blurb for this book while standing in the empty aisle of a Dollar Tree, I thought it would have a sci-fi quality to it.

Mentions of a mother being “wild,” a sister who “lives in the woods” and eats rabbits raw, meeting with the sister at night to “run, fearlessly,” the sister who “attacks a boy from town,” and you can see why I thought this was a story about werewolves.

Spoiler alert: it wasn’t.

Was I disappointed that there was no shapeshifting under the full moon? Absolutely. Was I still nervously anticipating how the story would end? Absolutely!

While this wasn’t a story about wolf-human hybrids, it was a story about secrets, misunderstandings, family dynamics, and a feral twin sister that no one believed the main character had.

Jo, the main character (named after her mother, Jolene), was delivered to her grandmother’s front door the moment she was born. Her mother was dead. Killed, the locals suspected, by her now-imprisoned boyfriend (and suspected impregnator) who’d always had a bit of a temper and his brother who was subsequently run out of town.

When Jo was five, a girl appeared outside her bedroom window. A girl that looked just like her. She told her grandmother, and her grandmother told her she was lying. Everyone, from that moment until she was a teenager, told her she was lying about having a twin.

Jo would frequently go outside to meet her sister in the woods, where she lived. Now, who’d allow a single-digit child to wander through the woods alone at night is beyond me, but that’s how the story goes. Jo would bring her sister, who she called “Lee” (from the other half of “Jolene”), clothes and snacks and then spend hours running with her through the woods. But Lee never wanted to come inside, never wanted to meet Jo’s family or friends, never wanted to not be a wild child.

One night, as teenage Jo was kissing her crush on a bridge, Lee attacked. Maybe she thought he was hurting her sister, maybe she was jealous because Jo’d told her she couldn’t spend as much time with her at night anymore, but she took a chunk out of the kid with a bad heart and left Jo with a festering bite on her arm for trying to defend him.

There’s a pastor secretly sleeping with Jo’s aunt, who Jo lives with above the bar her aunt runs. There’s Jo’s best friend, Savannah, who is deliberately falling into the arms of the older brother of Jo’s crush who her sister attacked. There’s forced church attendance, a lady with an obsession with birds, a mother with a drug habit, a grandmother with an anger habit, running away, being stalked in a Walmart, camping out in the woods, actual murder, and a loving reunion to wrap it with a bow.

This wasn’t a book I couldn’t put down, but I enjoyed this one. Really. Couldn’t for the life of me predict how it was going to end (which is a good thing), but it held my attention, and I looked forward to reading whenever I picked it up.

It was a decent Dollar Tree read, though, and I hope it will find a good home after I donate it to my local thrift store.

Read anything good lately? How’s your 2024 reading list coming along? Let me know!

🖤