This book was absolutely amazing. Adrienne Young is one of my favorite authors and everything she writes is pure magic to me. The Unmaking of June Farrow was one of my most anticipated reads of the year and it also became my favorite book read in 2023. I will think about this book daily, I’m sure of it. Thank you to Netgalley for this eARC in exchange for an honest review!

This 👏 Book 👏

I went into this one fairly blind and I was blown away!

The Farrow women live a cursed and mysterious life. For as far back as they can remember, madness and death have followed them.

When June's mother disappeared everyone wrote it off as a crazy woman taking her own life. No one suspected foul play and everyone expected the same madness to come for June.

Now years later, June has started hearing voices and seeing things that aren't really there. She's determined to figure out what is happening to her and to break the curse that has plagued them for centuries.
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When I started reading this book I wasn't really sure what to expect. Within the first couple chapters I was highly invested and very creeped out (in the best way).

It's almost hard to categorize the story. It's magical realism but with enough to suspense and mystery to keep you guessing and keep you on edge. And that's what really hooked me from the very beginning.

I loved so many of the characters and loved to hate the rest. The Farrow women, the towns people. Everyone we meet in this story played a significant role in the outcome and I just love that.

The setting was beautifully written. The farm added a realistic (and hardship) aspect to the story that I appreciated.

Everything came together in such an important and intentional way. It is a wonderfully written story and one that I will definitely read over and over again!

Read if you like:
🚪 Magical Realism
🚪 Suspense
🚪 Mystery
🚪 Curses
🚪 Dual Timelines
🚪 Second Chance Romance with a Twist
🚪 Small Town

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for the ARC!

Review posted on Goodreads and Instagram @factualfairytalereads

June Farrow lives in Jasper, North Carolina. Her family is known by their thriving flower farm. June has lived with her grandmother since her mother dropped her off in an alley when she was small. The whole town remembers her mom’s disappearance and know there’s something just a little different about the Farrow women. Now June has started have visual and auditory hallucinations. She doesn’t know all the details of the curse that plagues the women in her family. But when she finds a photo of her mother years before her mother was actually born, she’s determined to figure it out and make the curse end with her.

This felt very much like Fall. While I am traditionally not a fan of books with time travel, I feel like there was enough of a story otherwise to keep my attention. I did have to really focus to understand the logic (?) of the time travel aspect, so I wouldn’t consider it a quick read.

The Unmaking of June Farrow was good. It was a story that had many pieces and it unwound backwards. What was happening to these women??
Brilliantly written it threw me into a reading frenzy until I finished. It was mysterious and heartfelt. An atmospheric telling with many touching moments that I’ll probably never forget. I definitely recommend.
4.5⭐️
Thanks Random House Publishing and Delacorte Press via NetGalley.

This was another fantastic read from Adrienne Young. The magic element throughout a seemingly average life always captivates me. June faces an unthinkable choice that impacts the past, present and future. I couldn’t imagine being in her shoes. I was very thrilled at how the book ended. 100% recommend

This is up there for best reads of the year for me. This is a fantastic combination of fantasy, mystery/thriller, and romance. This is a story about a line of women who can time travel but in doing so, they are cursed to inevitably lose their minds. And while time travel stories are usually not something I am interested in, this was so well done. Adrienne Young's writing style is dreamy and atmospheric. This book is perfect for late-summer/fall and foggy mornings on the porch.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine, Delacorte Press for providing an eARC of this book!

Wow! I’m still captivated by this read days after completing it. What fantastic story telling with romance, mystery, and a hint of sci-fi/fantasy.

June Farrow, and all the Farrow women before her, are outsiders due to the madness cursing their bloodline. Junes mother goes missing one day while June is an infant, leaving June to be raised by her grandmother. When her grandmother dies, June chases a series of clues that have her questioning if hallucinations she has had for a year are leading her to her end or somewhere else entirely.

I loved this book because it just never felt like things were what they seemed to be. I loved the theme of family and the women who made decisions to protect their family. Im still thinking about all the details and the characters, especially June, have really stuck with me. I’m not normally one for slow build books, but this was a slow but necessary and worth it build. I’m really not sure I have ever read anything like this one.

Thank you to Random House and NetGalley for gifting me an ARC of this novel in exchange for an honest review!

For lovers of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue and The Ten Thousand Doors of January

This one’s a page turner, and I stayed up late to finish it. There are layers of mysteries here which was engaging and fun. But all the layers meant that we never quite got to know the characters besides June and that makes me question whether this book will really stick with me.

I like time travel, I like fish-out-of-water stories, and I like complicated female protagonists. I’m not sure I found all the reactions and choices believable, but it might just be that we didn’t get enough time with each of the characters.

I’ll likely reevaluate this rating in a couple of months. And once again, I think the publisher-provided summary gives too much away.

Thank you NetGalley for this ARC!

Omg. Wow. This was everything I could want and more. This is easily in my top 5 reads on the year. It was twisty and mysterious, while also being so sweet. I loved being able to connect the dots, and the story line not being super obvious from the get go, keeping you guessing right to the end. It started at a pretty slow pace, but it wasn’t in a boring way. Once the story picks up, you’re so invested. I wish I could summarize the plot, but that would give it away, so just know it’s worth the read. This makes me want to read everything ever written by this author, if it’s even half as good as this one.

I enjoyed this book! It was so well written, the characters were great, and the storyline was fantastic. This was a solid four-star read for me, and I can’t wait to read books this author again.

📚Book 249 of 2023📚

This book was so good. I can’t wait to read it a second time to see if I catch new things! I’m a whore for time travel novels, so this was right up my alley!

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC in exchange for my honest review!

Publication Date- 10/17/23

Firstly, thank you to NetGalley and Delacorte Press for sending me this eARC for review! This book… was an atmospheric and visceral read that will stick to my bones for a very long time. Adrienne Young did an astonishing job creating an all-too-real world with a whimsical yet believable magic system, which is what magical realism is supposed to be, right? I was fully entrenched in this book until the very end. I laughed, I cried, I grieved, and I loved right alongside our lovely and fiery June Farrow. This book is truly unlike anything I have read. It’s filled with mystery, longing, homecoming, and found/created family. If you are like me and are hesitant to pick up this story following perhaps a lackluster experience with Young’s previous adult novel, “Spells for Forgetting,” just take that leap of faith and read, you won’t regret it.

This book was so different than I thought it would be, but in a good way! I highly recommend going into it blind, but I will say it’s the perfect fall read. Slightly spooky with a mystery that will keep you guessing the entire time. I loved the characters and the romance was unexpected, but it was perfectly executed. This book would make a great movie and I would love to read it all over again now that I know how it ends. I definitely recommend this one!

The Unmaking of June Farrow by Adrienne Young had not business being this fantastically good. I knew I was going to enjoy this book and was very excited to read it but I didn't realize how much I was going to LOVE it. Adrienne Young's writing is so dreamy but easy to grasp and understand. I love it. The Unmaking of June Farrow feels so different from everything else that is getting published lately. It's original and you can't categorize it quickly, which I really like. The character development is wonderful, you can't help but feel for them and they definitely make the whole book. Thank you to NetGalley and Balletine for an ARC of this beautifully written book.

Thank you to netgalley and random house publishing for an arc in exchange for an honest review.


From the moment I picked up this book I couldn’t put it down and I completed it within twenty four hours. It’s a beautiful tale about love, motherhood and family. It is unlike anything I’ve read before and anything I will ever read again.

It’s hard to review this book without giving anything away because in these pages lies a intricately woven tale, one spanning lifetimes, and it is best to enter this story knowing as little as possible, and like June, our main character, when you flip to the first page you are opening a door to a whole new world.

You have no idea where this door will take you, or the person you will become when you reach the other side but the journey is one you must take- one you can’t turn away from.

This book unearthed an ache within me, a gnawing fear for these characters and how their lives would play out. It is twist after twist, making you hold your breath until you reach the last page finally able to breathe in but also saddened it’s over.

It is beautifully written with complex characters and an even more complex storyline that will leave you in sheer awe. It feels lifelike- it’s attention to detail rooting it within its own reality.

With elements of mental health representation, confronting death and grief, and a love and family that runs so deep they would do anything for each other, this book is never black and white and you will never guess what happens next.

Books like these are why I read, hoping to find a story that takes me off guard and makes me look at life a little differently. Worlds that fill my life with a color I can’t identify anywhere else. So next time you come across a door you are afraid to cross through, or a book you find yourself curious about but unsure, open it.

This was not my favorite of Adrienne Young's books. I absolutely loved Spells when it came out last year but the starts to June Farrow was just too darn slow and I was confused for the first third of the book. Once it came together in the end and I understood what was happening I enjoyed it, but I think the reader spends too much time being as confused as the main character June is about what's happening. That disorientation mad it hard for me to settle into the story. Once I got past the 35% mark and it started to come together I enjoyed it more but it never seemed to fully hit its stride and when a very important choice came up for June in the end there was no suspense for me because it was already clear what she would choose as there was nothing tying her to one of her options. Thanks to Netgalley and the author for this arc.

Wow. This was a good book with a unique premise. Such an emotional rollercoaster. I loved the supporting characters as well. 4.5 ⭐️, 0.5 🌶️

Thank you to NetGalley, the publishers, and author for granting me an advanced copy of the ebook in return for my honest unbiased review. This book is expected to be published in October 2023.

The Unmaking of June Farrow, a multi-generational mystery with a touch of romance and time-play, is a great followup to her previous magical realism novel Spells for Forgetting.

In Jasper, North Carolina, June Farrow is determined to break her family's curse, which has haunted the Farrow women for generations. After her grandmother's passing, June unearths clues linking her mother's disappearance to the town's dark history. She discovers a mysterious door that might hold the answers to Jasper's enigmas but risks her sanity the deeper she delves. As she crosses the threshold, June's journey reshapes both past and future.

The Unmaking of June Farrow is a little more intense and complex than the cozy mystery you find in Spells for Forgetting and I really enjoyed Young's criss-crossed timeline and the layering involved. June's personal journey was deeply felt and the characters around her were wonderfully solid and vivid.

My main takeaway for the majority of the book was just how perfectly Young depicted the North Carolina small, mountain town feel. She captured the essence of this brilliantly and remained true to the setting and characters without ever going over the top, which is a main beef I often have with Southern fiction. It's clear that Young lives in that area and I was thrilled with how perfectly she portrayed this particular brand of Southernness on the page, something that's hard to do even for native North Carolinians, much less transplants like her.

There are a lot of elements from Spells for Forgetting to which she has returned for the barest bones of how the two compare: small town community, an old and unsolved murder, a farm that feeds into sustaining the economy of the area, an outsider family, and a multi-generational family at the heart of it all. But her setting is not the only thing she changed for The Unmaking of June Farrow. The way Young played with story and character here was a wonderfully fresh take and reminded me a lot of Sarah Addison Allen's Garden Spells.

As June explores the mystery, her place in the world, her relationships with the people in her life, and the idea of fate, are all tested. Once again, Young infuses the novel with an intriguing mystery, captivating atmosphere, and a moving romance. Her overall storytelling, exceptional characters, and writing style perfectly aligns with my preferences and expectations.

The Unmaking of June Farrow

By Adrienne Young

Set in the hills of North Carolina, Young has created an almost gothic tale of seeming madness that runs in one particular family, the Farrows, and only in women. There seem not to be many men in the Farrow family, and the name passes from mother to daughter.
But is it madness? Or is it possible to live in two worlds on entirely different timelines?
This is a book that kept drawing me back to it, no matter what else I was reading. That’s a sign of a tale well told. I had to pay close attention to keep track of what was happening in the two timelines, who the characters were and how they interacted. But I was desperate to find out what was going to happen, how the book would end.
There’s a murder mystery at the center of the second timeline. There’s a brooding husband and a golden haired little girl. June’s grandmother in the second timeline is younger than she is. The question for June has always been what happened to her mother. That’s what draws her through the red door that isn’t there.
I hope I’ve intrigued you.

I basically read THE UNMAKING OF JUNE FARROW in one sitting. I love Adrienne Young's dreamy prose and cloudy soft universes. SPELLS FOR FORGETTING made me weep and THE UNMAKING OF JUNE FARROW made me cheer. I LOVE June and love all the supporting characters, love the time flip-flop between 2023 and 1951, and especially love the North Carolina setting. This is a perfect autumnal novel and perfect witchy novel.

The UNMAKING OF JUNE FARROW is definitely in my top 10 of the year! Going to make sure my book club picks it up for our October read. Thank you to NetGalley and RandomHouse for the ARC!