One Sentence Summary: When June starts seeing things that aren’t there just like her late grandmother and mother had, including a red door, she thinks it’ll be the end of her, but it’s really just the start.

In Brief
A rich, atmospheric story full of romance, mystery, and family, The Unmaking of June Farrow isn’t exactly spellbinding, but certainly propels the reader forward with a sweet romance, a tangled murder mystery, and charming prose. In the present day, June is a 30-something year old woman coping with the loss of her grandmother amid an increasing number of episodes where she sees and hears things that aren’t there. When a family friend tells her to go through the red door when it next appears to her, she does just that, sending herself back in time to 1951. There, she meets a man who doesn’t want her there even though they’re married and have a daughter she never allowed herself to dream of having. But, with the town’s beloved minister’s murder fresh in the town’s memory, and with June having some connection to it, whether through herself or her long-vanished mother, June is in danger and must depend on herself to piece together what happened, and how to save her own family. The Unmaking of June Farrow is perfect for fans of magical realism and Young’s Spells for Forgetting, but the time travel is mind boggling. Fortunately, the romance and murder mystery are strong enough to step in to offer an intriguing story to captivate the reader.

Extended Thoughts
Family is a complicated thing, especially when the family members themselves are complicated beings, with a curse thrown in for good measure. This is exceedingly true in The Unmaking of June Farrow, and sometimes my brain still explodes a little when it tries to figure out how everything was connected. While I can safely say I enjoyed this one far more than Young’s first adult novel, there were still details that I felt were lacking or left flapping in the wind. I wouldn’t mind so much, but those details kept coming up and I just couldn’t figure out where they came from or where they were going.

The Unmaking of June Farrow opens with June’s grandmother’s funeral. Raised by her grandmother after her mother disappeared when she was a baby, June now has no one except her grandmother’s oldest friend Birdie, who lives with her, and her childhood friend Mason. But she’s not interested in forming relationships because her family is cursed to slowly lose their minds, and she intends on being the last of the Farrows. She holds fast, though, to the mystery of her mother’s disappearance, and the arrival of a photograph in the mail has her linking her mother’s disappearance with the long ago murder of the town’s beloved minister. What June isn’t telling everyone, though, is that she’s been seeing things for about a year. When Birdie uncovers that secret, she encourages June to go through the door. And, when she does, she lands herself right in the middle of a murder mystery in a past she doesn’t understand with people she doesn’t know, but who certainly know her.

The Family
For a few generations, the Farrow women have lived with this curse, and there’s one daughter every generation. It’s not a complex family since the daughters seem to be either raised by their mother or grandmother and there never seems to be a father in the picture. June is the last of her line, and intends on keeping it that way. She’s watched her grandmother slowly deteriorate, though Margaret described it as living in two different times, so doesn’t want to make anyone she loves suffer. For that, I had to commend her. Just reading about the curse that afflicted the women sounded like it would be hard to live with. At the same time, these are just women.

I enjoyed reading about all of them. Even if the reader only really gets to know June, her grandmother Margaret, and her grandmother’s grandmother Esther, it’s enough to see how the family has suffered, how the people have treated them, and how different they are from each other. I enjoyed getting to know them and coming to understand them and why they did what they did. It was particularly fun to get to know Margaret as a young woman, especially since she was very different as the woman raising June while dealing with her own demons.

My favorite part of the characters, though, was they felt suitably mature. In Spells for Forgetting, I was bothered by how much younger the adult characters felt. I had no such feeling with these characters, though that might also be because there was a young girl who relied on all of them to take care of her. Sometimes June did feel a little too impulsive, but I liked that she felt a lot more mature and went into things with her eyes as open as she could make them.

The Time Travel
This is always hit or miss for me. It did boggle my mind a little, especially when I was trying to reconcile timelines that were diverging. The how was explained as much as magic is usually described in magical realism, and I had no problems with it. But, when time travel is involved and takes multiple people back and forth in time, well, things can get messy. This was messier in my head as I tried to reconcile everything I know about time travel and how it was used in this story than it was on page, but I’m not sure if it’s just because that messiness was simply ignored in favor of the unraveling mystery June finds herself in.

As much as the time travel was necessary in telling this story, I didn’t feel satisfied with how it was done. It was an interesting device, but it just brings up so many questions, and even more questions when the fact that this is a small Southern town comes into the picture. Fortunately, I was able to enjoy most of the story as long as I didn’t think about it too hard or too long, but I felt like The Unmaking of June Farrow was just asking too much of me, especially when the whole story depended on the idea of these women being able to travel back and forth in time.

The Questions
And that leads me to my questions, because they left me feeling a little dissatisfied with the book. I certainly enjoyed it more than Spells for Forgetting, but I hate it when books leave me with pressing questions that contribute to my enjoyment of a story.

In the case of The Unmaking of June Farrow, the curse on the Farrow women felt like the main cause and problem of everything that happened in the story, yet it’s never really addressed; it’s just there. It exists and it’s up to the reader to believe it exists and to go with it. I’m not the kind of reader to just go with it just because the author asks me to. This is why I usually struggle with time travel stories. In order to make a story believable, I need to understand the root of the problem. In June’s case, it’s the curse. Where did it come from? Why is it just the Farrow women? What, exactly, is its purpose? Generally speaking, just why? I don’t understand the why behind the curse. I don’t understand where it began. So, I spent the whole book waiting for those questions to be answered. While I did manage to be caught up in the story of family, the romance, and the mystery, those questions were always at the back of my mind and eventually impacted my enjoyment as I reached the end and felt threads were just left flapping in the wind.

Related to that is my question of why the rest of the town doesn’t seem to notice or put pieces together? This is a small town where generations of families have lived and been raised. How can no one have put together that the exact same women/woman existed in the past and present? Why have there been no weird stories about the Farrow women and how, in the present, grandparents never questioned why one woman they knew in the past seems to also exist in the present? Generally, why are there just no stories running around town about these women other than that there’s something wrong with them so it’s better to avoid them?

I have more questions, but they’re all wrapped up in the time travel and the how and the when. This is why I tend to have problems with time travel stories. Unfortunately, because this is magical realism, it’s just something the reader has to accept as existing and existing in this way.

The Romance
The romance between June and Eamon was a fun one. I wasn’t a huge fan of all the secrets, but, as distrustful and hurt Eamon seemed, he really was noble and I loved how he always put his daughter first. No matter how strange the Farrow women are, I liked how close he was to him, especially since the reader understands men aren’t really ever in the picture. But I liked Eamon. He felt solid and safe, and I enjoyed watching him and June together as they danced around how different the timeline turned out to be. I enjoyed the push and pull between them, enjoyed how June caught him off guard sometimes, and really loved that slow circle they made around each other as they tried to figure out what to do with each other and the nature of the relationship they’d had before. Mostly, I loved that it wasn’t front and center so the rest of the story could breathe around it.

The Mystery
The mystery was probably my favorite part of this book. It opened and ended strong with it, but I did feel it gave way to the romance too much during the middle. Still, it kept me engaged and I couldn’t wait to see how it played out. I did feel like I figured out what was going and what had happened faster than the characters, and that kind of ruined my enjoyment a little as it was a little tiresome to wait for them to catch up. But I liked how it wrapped up, and liked learning more about the characters involved. It was a sad story, but a fun mystery to read about. All the little clues were sprinkled in, and I felt like I had to be paying attention in order to catch them all. My mind was definitely working overtime to piece it together, especially when it came to sorting out the timeline.

Final Words
The Unmaking of June Farrow was certainly a lot more fun to me than Young’s first adult novel. While it had a lot of the same elements, this one felt more mature and, as a whole, suited me better as a reader. I enjoyed the romance as it felt more woven around the mystery and was certainly a lot more mature. I loved seeing June, Eamon, and Annie together as a family, and especially adored Annie. The mystery was also a lot more engaging to me, especially since I never felt like it was forgotten in favor of the romance. I enjoyed the slow peeling back of the layers and the characters involved and the aura of danger kept me hooked throughout the story. Unfortunately, there were a lot of questions I had regarding the time travel and the curse that are just never answered, and that bothers me still. Fortunately, there are a lot of good things to enjoy about this book, and I’ll look forward to what Young has to offer next as each book seems to get progressively better.


Thank you to NetGalley and Delacorte for a review copy. All opinions expressed are my own.

June has lived her life under the weight of a family curse that seems to cause the women in her family to lose their awareness. Determined to break the curse, she lives her life without attachments and keeps track of the hallucinations she starts to have, particularly of a door. However after her grandmother's death, a close family friend tells her to try going through that door and this leads June back in time where it appears the people also know her. Thus, June tries to unravel the mystery of her family while also securing the future for herself and her daughter. Overall, a gripping mystery of one women trying to sort out the strange happenings around her and solve the mystery of her family's curse. At times it was confusing due to the various timelines and trying to keep track of the characters, but it came together in the end.

This book was so lovely! A story of family, strong women, secrets, love and dash of murder, The Unmaking of June Farrow was a moving book that will stick with me for a while. I won't share too much about the plot, as I think it is best to go in blind.

Although I was intrigued by the book from the start, once the inciting incident happened, I couldn't put it down. I spent my whole Saturday lost in June's story. I loved the focus on the Farrow women and their relationships - how they interacted with each other and what they chose to reveal and hide. I was also hooked by the various mysteries as June searched for the truth of her own and her family's histories.

This was a wonderful magical realism read and I would highly recommend it if that is your cup of tea!

This one is going to stick with me for a long time. I honestly went through a rollercoaster of emotions while reading it. And I can’t stop thinking about it. I don’t think I ever will.

Young’s writing is so atmospheric, that this book and her other magical realism book, Spells for Forgetting, were like a masterclass on how to write feelings into existence. She takes real normal human emotions and sprinkles them with this beautiful dusting of magic and her books take you to another place. They are so easy to fall into and forget you’re reading.

If you loved The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, you will love this book.

Just wow. I can’t say much about the plot without spoiling it, but I love it so much. Everyone please read this.

𝗧𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗲𝘀 𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴.

💐 Time Travel
💐 Family Curse that spans generations
💐 Family Secrets
💐 Unsolved Town Murder
💐 Second Chance-ish
💐 Forced Proximity
💐 Small farm town in Blue Ridge Mountains

I read this book in one day because I couldn’t put it down! All the freaking stars! This is an enthralling story about a woman trying to break her family’s curse before she succumbs to it and gets caught up in the fraying of time. Secrets are revealed, emotions are high, and decisions will need to be made.

Adrienne Young is an auto-buy author for me because her stories just suck you in. This book is no different! I wish I could force everyone to read this book! It’s imaginative with infinite possibilities of what could happen to June Farrow. What life will she choose, what vision will she see next, will the curse claim her? I went in blind to this book and think that’s the best way to experience it. This is definitely a top read of the year for me.

What a magical, thrilling, story that kept me on my toes from the first page. I really had no idea what to expect when I picked up this book other than I KNEW I was going to love it becasue it is an Adrienne Young book and she is one of my favorite authors. But let me tell you, I was blown away!

This book took me through all the feels. I was nervous and sad, I had anxiety and I felt the pain and lonelyness that June felt, the anger and the love. The feeling that you belong in two places but which one is your true home. Or even the feeling of is this who I really am.

Adrienne Young is nothing but an AMZAZING storyteller. She pulls you in and takes you for a ride that ends in a whirlwind of emotions and twists. I will never not pick up one of her books! Thank you for an advanced copy!!

The Farrow women are cursed. It's no secret to the inhabitants of Jasper, NC that the Farrow women succumb to madness. A year after starting to hear and see things that aren't there, June's grandmother dies and she begins discovering cryptic clues about her family as well as her mother's disappearance. It's up to her to learn more about her family and try to break her family's curse once and for all.

This book gave off the perfect fall vibes. I enjoyed the characters, the mystery, and the magic. It was full of unexpected plot twists and kept me interested! I will say that it wrapped up a little too quick for me. I think I would have loved this even more if the relationships between the characters as well as the ending were more flushed out.

Thanks to Netgalley and Randomhouse for an advanced copy of this book.

Thanks so much for the ARC! This was hands down one of the best books I have read this year! It was a perfect October read full of mystery and trying to figure out where the book was headed next. I loved the character development, learning how the story unfolded and the decision at the end. It was such a good book! I can't wait to recommend this to every one.

Oh my gosh I loved this book. Probably one of my top books of the year. I went in mostly blind having no idea where this story would go and wow, it was the most beautiful journey. I loved the character of June and learning about the curse of the Farrows. Young’s writing was incredible at drawing you in and describing the world and how June lives. Loved it.

The Unmaking of June Farrow is my new favorite Adrienne Young book! It is atmospheric, magical, and so complex! Recently someone asked me what genres I like mixed together and this book is the perfect example! There is magic, fantasy, and romance and I also loved the time travel elements so much. June’s journey is thrilling and romantic and had me gripped until the very last page. I really loved the themes of sacrifice and love and also how family ties are explored as well.

4.5 stars

This is a really good book about a very unusual second chance romance! This time travel story is full of unpredictable surprises and amazing family relationships. The twists and turns kept me guessing right up to the end and kept reading way too late into the night! Thanks Random House Publishing - Ballantine, Delacorte Press #NetGalley

The Farrow women are known for their beautiful flowers and local business in rural North Carolina. But they are also known for being cursed with madness. As June watches her Gran’s lucid moments decline, she is determined to find out what has happened to the women in her family and more importantly to stop any oncoming sickness in herself. However, after receiving mysterious clues from the past, June’s story thread takes a major turn and leaves her wondering what is reality and who can be trusted.

This author consistently captures the reader and pulls them into her novels — and she has done it again. The character building is great and the add in of the fantastical makes the novel mysteriously addicting. I couldn’t put it down! The romance thread is unconventional and refreshing. The mystery is perfectly balanced with the known and unknown. I truly was engaged and immersed in this world. I definitely recommend this read! 5 stars.

Review based on a digital Advanced Reader’s Copy provided by Random House Publishing Group/Delacorte Press and NetGalley. Thank you!

I've had a very touch and go experience with Adrienne's previous books and for various reasons. However, this was her best book yet and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The mystery and intrigue were on point. And the setting.... sounds so beautiful.

Adrienne has such a way with words and her prose is almost lyrical. It's beautiful. Highly recommend this one.

Thank you so much to Netgalley and the publisher for a chance to read the arc on exchange for an honest review

My first Adrienne Young book and I LOVE IT! Such a beautiful and heartbreaking book. Definitely a 5-star read!

Wow, what a book! This one gave me all the feels. Magical realism. mystery, family drama- this has it all! Such a great fall read- highly recommend!

Absolutely yes. I loved everything about this. The time travel was so interesting. The characters were all well developed. At no point did i guess how it would end. This was beautiful, I’ll read anything by this author!

Firstly, as always, thank you for Netgalley and Delacorte Press for providing an eARC of this book to review in exchange for my honest opinion.

My honest opinion? I love magical realism. I love time travel. I am a doctor who girlie to my core and usually those elements are everything to me. I understand the many different ways time travel can be explained and I just live for magic in books, especially magical realism. So I should have loved this book! And I *desperately* wanted to. It was my first Adrienne Young book and honestly, her prose is beautiful but I struggled to get into this book and enjoy it.

I kept up with the plot pretty well but I feel like I’m in the minority when I say that this book felt so… boring? I couldn’t find myself connecting with the main character outside of her mourning in the beginning of the book. When she travels back in time, I was so intrigued by what was going to happen but the longer she stayed in that time, the less I cared. I understand that her family didn’t want to give too many details because they expected her to go back to modern day, but the lack of communication over a possible murder of a literal small town minister was really so annoying.

I wanted to love this and like I said, Adrienne Young has such beautiful prose and i’m super open to reading more of her books. 2.5/5 for me but rounding up to 3 because its not that its bad, I just couldn’t get into it.

“We were cursed—the Farrow women.”

i can’t explain the book with my own words but i can tell you what it will make you feel:

- from chapter 1 you won’t be able to stop reading.
- you’ll be confused as hell at the beginning
- does it remind you of outlander a little?
- it will feel like a christopher nolan movie playing in your head
- then you’ll remember when you watched dark for the first time
- you’ll start crying because you’ll remember this is how reading a book is supposed to make you feel: the excitement of not knowing what will happen next, the sudden rush of adrenaline when you’re slowly figuring it out, the not wanting it to be over
- you’ll stay looking at a wall for the next hour trying to figure out what you just read and how to act normal after all that information going into your brain

if you still don’t wanna read it that’s one you but trust me when i tell you your brain will be altered after this one.

thank you netgalley for the arc in exchange of an honest review.

Wow, I loved this so much. What an adventure this story takes you on! The amazing cover caught my eye first and I was hoping the story carried the same vibe… One hundred percent!

At first, I was waiting and wondering where the mystery and hints of magic were going to take us. Slowly reading a little here and there. And then once the story starts to unfold, it was an all out binge read! It’s a little creepy, a little mysterious, deeply romantic and magical. I was hooked and cannot wait to read more Adrienne Young books.

I had put this book aside bc I thought it was going in a direction I hate… I’m so glad I saw a blurb that inspired me to pick it back up- it definitely did something totally different! I LOVE the central trope (which I can’t name bc spoilers) and while I’m not always a romance girly- I thought this book was romantic in a lovely way. So excited to keep reading everything the author writes.

Thank you so much @netgalley & @delacortepress 🖤