Three years ago, Olivia Foster lost her brother when he drowned in the backyard swimming pool. She feels like her family died that day. Her mother is addicted to medication. Her father rarely comes home on time from work. Olivia feels like she is drowning too.  That changes when a house across the street suddenly gets new neighbors. The Hallas family is strange. The grandmother smokes cigars on the porch, the mother spends her time collecting antiques, and the daughter writes letters to serial killers. The daughter, Kara Hallas, is on a mission to bring Olivia out of the depths of despair and back into life. Olivia and Kara find ways to break the rules, and begin to sign letters to killers as The Resurrection Girls. 

Resurrection Girls is intended for teenagers, but it is super dark. The Hallas house was once the site of a suicide. Death is everywhere in this book, and there are a sheer lack of healthy coping mechanisms. However, I absolutely loved this book and flew through it late one night when I was supposed to be sleeping. Ava Morgyn's writing was worth my lack of sleep. Resurrection Girls features a strange ending, but one that was deeply satisfying.

Resurrection Girls is available October 1, 2019 from Albert Whitman & Company. It is a great Halloween Month read.

** I was provided with an electronic ARC from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for honest review.**


Actual rating: 3.5 stars


Ava Morgyn's debut novel, Resurrection Girls, is a hard-hitting novel of grief and all that comes with it. Our main character, Olivia, has had her world ripped apart by the accidental drowning death of her three-year-old brother Robby. When a new family moves into the house across the street, Olivia meets Kara, who is the first person to have an impact in dragging Olivia out of isolation since the event.

I expected this novel to be more fantastical based on the synopsis, which reveals that there is a generational curse on Kara's family, and the cover which suggests some kind of spookiness. However, this book swerves hard away from true fantasy and settles into the realm of magical realism. Even the magical realism parts of the novel aren't nearly as prominent as the coming-of-age and coming out of grieving portions of the book.

While I realized that this book involved the death of a toddler, I did not realize that the entirety of the story would revolve so firmly around Robby's death and the destruction it wrought on Olivia's family. Coming from a family impacted by infant death, some of these scenes were particularly hard-hitting for me and I wish that there had been more of a warning about how integral to the story that death would be.

Morgyn's writing style was one that flowed very naturally with the story, and I felt that it was easy to become invested in Olivia and her friends. I expected the plot to center more around the letters to serial killers, and while they were very important in the end, they weren't nearly as much of a center point as I had thought.

Overall, I felt this book was a good first showing for Morgyn and I would definitely be willing to read whatever book she produces next.

Hello, I will adding my review to Instagram, Goodreads, and my blog on September 25th, 2019. I will be adding the links to the reviews once they are posted. Thank you!

Title: Resurrection Girls
Author: Ava Morgyn
Genre: YA Fantasy
Publication Date: October 1st, 2019
eARC provided by publisher through NetGalley. All opinions are my own.



Synopsis: "Olivia Foster hasn’t felt alive since her little brother drowned in the backyard pool three years ago. Then Kara Hallas moves in across the street with her mother and grandmother, and Olivia is immediately drawn to these three generations of women. Kara is particularly intoxicating, so much so that Olivia not only comes to accept Kara's morbid habit of writing to men on death row, she helps her do it. They sign their letters as the Resurrection Girls.

But as Kara’s friendship pulls Olivia out of the dark fog she’s been living in, Olivia realizes that a different kind of darkness taints the otherwise lively Hallas women—an impulse that is strange, magical, and possibly deadly." (Goodreads)



My Review:
You ever read a book and the first thought that pops into your head after you finish is, "What the heck did I just read?". Well, this is how I am feeling! It's not in a bad way but the whole book just caught me off guard.

The main character of this book is Olivia and the plot focuses around her family and how each one is dealing with the loss of her little brother. Grief is a terrible thing and can take over our life and can lead us down a path of bad decisions. The way that grief plays out in this book is unique and adds a touch of supernatural. It breathes life into their family once again.

I enjoyed reading about Olivia as well as the quick friendship she finds herself in with Kara. Olivia is more timid and focuses on the bad while Kara is wild, careless, and wants to pull Olivia out of the grief that is consuming her life. Kara brings out another side of her and things get quite interesting when they start being pen pals with murderers!

The plot was more interesting than what I had expected and the added plot twists were  either bizarre or just shocking, but I was definitely here for it.

Overall, I enjoyed this book and if you are intrigued by the synopsis or my review, definitely check it out!

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review. My opinion has not been affected by the free book.

I'm sorry, but I have to put this on my DNF pile at 45%. I'm not sure what I thought I was going to read when I requested this book, but it certainly isn't what I got. I like to leave my reviews on a positive note so I'm going to talk about what didn't work for me in this book first.

I knew from the premise these girls were going to write to men on death row, but what I didn't know was how detailed this book would get on the crimes. It makes for some pretty uncomfortable and disturbing reading if you don't expect it. I think what makes this even more uncomfortable and disturbing is that the girls are teenagers, and the men they're writing to are professing love and saying they're beautiful and so forth. Then it gets even worse when one girl is giving them her picture and real name, and selling things from these letters as "murderabilia". Now, I realize that this is a practice that goes on in real life, but that does not make it any less uncomfortable and creepy to me.

I can appreciate this book for diving into grief and a couple losing their child, and I was glad when Olivia finally blew up at her father. But again, it was a little frustrating to see these parents expect their child to act more grown up and pulled together than they were when she was grieving too and should've been allowed to do so. I'm hoping they learn to grieve in a more healthy way later in the book.

Honestly, I think this comes down as the wrong type of book for me. I'm sure there are readers who will like the story. I couldn't get past the uncomfortable and creepy details of the men on death row.

**3.5 Stars**

What an odd little book.

“Resurrection Girls” finds Olivia going through the motions of life following the drowning death of her little brother 3 years earlier and the fallout of her family life as her parents deal with their grief in distant and self destructive ways when new neighbors move in offering something new and dangerous while showing just how interesting the cycle of life can be.

This is such a strange book because for a good portion I thought it was going to be one thing less rooted in the paranormal/fantasy elements before it jumped into something else where it plays into the maiden, mother, crime dynamic rather well. The women across the street all have a role to play in Olivia’s journey through her grief as well as have an eye out for when it’s their turn to move on to the next stage of life and embrace that change when it comes because at the end of the day it’s something you can’t fight as death comes for us all.

I’m not sure how I felt about the romance element I think the story would have been better with the side character added and just have it be a story about these two young women and the changes in their lives without making it a trio as it just made them revert to this rather juvenile fight over a boy when they offered and became so much more to each other.

The entire descent into grief the Olivia goes through is written so beautifully as we see her move through each stage and confront her parents about their absence in her life following the accident and how her strength to come out of it and face the world post Robby is enough to make them confront their own demons and I think that was probably one of my favorite aspects of the book as it’s something so real and heartbreaking.

This book is okay and a pretty fast read but just a wuick trigger warning it does discuss accidental death, murder, rape and substance abuse.

**special thanks to the publishers and netgalley for providing an arc in exchange for a fair and honest review**