After Isabella's mother's death, she is forced to return to her hometown of Wyrdwood, a place she swore she'd never return to. Her family has run the Fandelli Funeral Home for generations, but Isabella has no desire to continue on with the family business. Izzy and her sister Bluciel uncover family secrets, all the while mysterious deaths surrounding rave parties are happening in their quiet little town. Who is responsible and will Izzy and her sister make it out alive?

This book was right up my alley. It takes place in an slightly alternate world where mythical creatures like satyrs, ogres, and other semi-human beings coexist. There is mystery and family secrets to keep you guessing. Isabella and Bluciel are strong, fleshed-out characters, each in their own way. The pacing was fast and I got through this one pretty quick despite it being just over 400 pages. Upon further review, it seems that author Angel Leigh McCoy has a whole Wyrdwood series. I will be checking the rest of these books out.

Thank you to Net Galley for allowing me to read and review this book. I definitely recommend it for fans of dark fantasy mysteries.

I gave this book a little over 50 pages and 8 chapters to pull me in, and unfortunately DNF’d it, for various reasons. Instead of going into a full review, which wouldn’t be appropriate for a book I’ve only read about a quarter of, I’m going to list the pros/cons here.

First, the good: the writing is overall decent enough and occasionally poignant. Moreover, I was really interested in this book’s concept because I think people don’t capitalize on the rich stories that can be told about deathcare work and the mortuary industry nearly enough. As the industry is very stigmatized, I was happy that this book approaches it with respect.

Now, the bad: that’s basically the only topic this book treats respectfully. There are several fetishistic comments about the protagonist’s biracial ancestry, referencing her curves potentially coming from “her African ancestry”, that sit wrong knowing the author is white. The random aside about cultural appropriation also felt very out of place, as if it were making a joke of correcting people using appropriative language. In the first fifty pages, they make several glib references to a character being transgender including a joke that “ironically, [the trans woman]’s sister was the one who had balls!” and a recounting of transphobic sexual harrassment of a child without any warning prior to the book establishing that there would be substantial transphobia depicted on page.

Another thing that threw me is the clumsy incorporation of the Italian language at random throughout the narrative prose, not just dialogue. On any given page, there’s more than a handful of Italian words peppered awkwardly throughout the text. The otherwise okay quality of the writing was negatively impacted by this. I found it disconcerting that the author offers a glossary of Italian words and not basic content warnings for things like depictions of transphobia.

Ultimately, this was disappointing. I couldn’t recommend this book in good conscience and have no interest in reading anything this author puts out in the future.

I didn't like this book very much. It is over written and under edited. It's narrated by a spirit who is supposed to be Italian-American and even though it is narrating in English, it lards the text with Italian. A bit of this would perhaps be colorful but the spirit uses so much a glossary is included as a preface. If you need a glossary it's too much. Also there is a dedication. And an epigraph. All before we start the story. Then there is the evil Satyr. As we all know, Satyrs are mischievous not evil and are generally associated with sexuality. Of course, a fictional evil demon can have any shape, but this creature is named a Satyr and it spends the chapter torturing a dead soul to torment a sleeping undertaker. Nah.