Our Crooked Hearts

Starred review from April 18, 2022
Ivy Chase, 17, is on her way home from a party when the car in which she’s riding nearly hits a naked young woman standing in the road. A bizarre encounter ensues, and unsettling events follow: a decapitated rabbit appears in Ivy’s suburban driveway, and someone else’s face flashes in her mirror. After Ivy discovers inexplicable inconsistencies in her childhood memories, she decides to confront her mother, Dana, and honorary aunt, Fee, both of whom seem capable of “unnatural things.” Upon arriving at the women’s herbal remedies shop, however, Ivy finds the business closed and a surface bloody. Albert (The Hazel Wood) skillfully interweaves Ivy’s increasingly urgent search
for answers with chapters from Dana’s perspective, recounting her and Fee’s 16th summer. While at the teens’ fathers’ fish fry, the motherless, rudderless girls meet Marion Peretz, a lonely 17-year-old who’s fond of punk rock and dark magic. Tension and terror mount as the intelligently crafted, viscerally plotted story lines converge. Atmospherically tense prose and vividly sketched, true-to-life characters add depth, resulting in a tale both spellbinding and bingeworthy. Most characters cue as white. Ages 14–up. Agent: Faye Bender, Book Group.