Something Kindred delivers modern haunted ghosts, secretive communities, and family skeletons. It’s perfect for fans of contemporary fantasy and unspoken promises broken. Keep reading this book review of Something Kindred for my full thoughts.
Summary
Welcome to Coldwater. Come for the ghosts, stay for the drama.
Jericka Walker had planned to spend the summer before senior year soaking up the sun with her best friend on the Jersey Shore. Instead she finds herself in Coldwater, Maryland, a small town with a dark and complicated past where her estranged grandmother lives—someone she knows only two things her name and the fact that she left Jericka’s mother and uncle when they were children. But now Jericka’s grandmother is dying, and her mother has dragged Jericka along to say goodbye.
As Jericka attempts to form a connection with a woman she’s never known, and adjusts to life in a town where everything closes before dinner, she meets “ghost girl” Kat, a girl eager to leave Coldwater and more exciting than a person has any right to be. But Coldwater has a few unsettling secrets of its own. The more you try to leave, the stronger the town’s hold. As Jericka feels the chilling pull of her family’s past, she begins to question everything she thought she knew about her mother, her childhood, and the lines between the living and the dead.
Review
(Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher. This has not impacted my review which is unbiased and honest.)
Something Kindred is a summer derailed. It exists in the liminal space of living and dead, of uncovering secrets and ghosts. Family that hurt us, that we are angry at, but we still love and care about. People who test the boundaries of our love, our forgiveness, and our anger. Something Kindred explores cyclical mistakes and the ways consequences ripple down. It’s perfect for fans of small towns, rules and social niceties, the people who never leave.
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In Something Kindred, the limits of the town are tested by outsiders who see through the illusions. Someone who hears the echoes of the past, the racism, and the buried scapegoats. Jericka’s story examines family and the complicated nature of anger, resentment, and love. Of feeling like we fail this model of who we should be, of missing the image of the family we think we have. This book balances these layers of complex feelings – of wanting to stay, to leave – and sets it against a backdrop of secrets and whispers.
Find Something Kindred on Goodreads, Storygraph, Amazon, Bookshop.org, & Blackwells.