Sarah Gailey has written a novel that seeps under your skin. This is horror rooted in emotional truth, and it’s all the more frightening for it. Fans of Shirley Jackson and Ari Aster will appreciate this kind of dread.

I loved this!!! It’s the perfect mix of slow-burn mystery, grief study, and unknowable nature horror. It explores the deep human needs to belong and be loved — and the people who exploit those needs for their own gain. Gailey’s writing is eminently readable and the characters feel set upon a journey rather than pushed and pulled by the plot. This is one of my favorite reads so far this year!

This extraordinary horror novel lives up to its descriptive blurb, which suggests the title for fans of Shirley Jackson, Ari Aster, and Patricia Highsmith. What a mix, huh? This is not only about a cult, and a mysterious ecological phenomenon, but about battling systems of belief and the concepts of family, belonging, and grief. Gailey keeps getting better, and here, one of her strategies is relaying the most jawdropping events dispassionately, lending them--in the text--a normalcy they shouldn't have...which is terrifying. Strong supporting characters and plots make this a gripping and harrowing read. The focus is on the people and their personal and interpersonal conflicts, not on explaining the mysterious reef, which is a supporting player. It's just doing what it's doing. The real horror is to be found on land. This is a wild ride, and more than a little heartbreaking.

Sarah Gailey is BRILLIANT. This was my introduction to her writing, and I’m about to fangirl into her other works. The story is a bit of a slow burn - the dread creeps and creeps until it’s suffocating. Comparisons to Midsommar are apt. There are multiple POV characters, and the timeline does skip back and forth. Once I understood the signposts, I settled in to the framing. Celia’s “current day” sections are written in past tense and her chapters include headers with a little coral polyp; flashbacks are written in the present tense, which is an interesting way to give them a sense of urgency. I think this was a smart choice, since there is a lot of interiority and stylistic repetition.

The characters are all nicely fleshed-out, which is impressive because it’s a large cast. They’re not all likeable, but you understand their motivations. It’s hard to watch someone being gaslit and brainwashed, but Gailey does a terrific job showing how this can happen, and the trauma, circumstances, and (lack of) support systems that may make a person more vulnerable to it.

TW: There are descriptions of pregnancy loss, so proceed with caution if this is something that may be difficult.

The acknowledgements are a must-read, as other reviewers have said. This is a novel that I’ll be thinking about for a long time.

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to review an ARC!

An amazing book from Sarah Gailey. They have such a way with building strange worlds. The characters are vibrant and unique. The story is complex and strange. I loved the unexpected directions it goes. I hesitate to say too much because I feel like this is a book best gone into knowing as little as possible.

Around a third of the way into this book, I found myself wondering when something, anything, was going to happen. It wasn’t for another hundred or so pages that I realized that, like Celia, Kindred Cove had been wearing down my defenses since the beginning.

Midsommar, without Ari Aster’s lack of empathy; human and haunting.

Thank you to Sarah Gailey, Tor, and Netgalley for the ARC!

This was brilliant. Exactly what you would want from it. It had a little bit of everything, and it did them all right. This was weird, surreal, obsessive, with a slow build of dread. The community dynamics were done well, and the background of the Cove was introduced to us in a subtle way that was slow, gradual. Luring.

The Sci-Fi elements were a surprise but ended up being one of my favorite parts of the story. I think it adds so much to the surrealism / speculative nature of the narrators.

My only qualm was how some of the names seemed to blend together. I had to search back in the text to remember who was who and what we knew about them. Still, once we met a character — really met them — they stuck with you.

I loved this one! It’s very unsettling, this one has you questioning yourself, the story, the reality, with emotion at every page, this one held me close!

Make Me Better is quiet, hypnotic, deeply unsettling horror that doesn’t scream at you — it smiles, takes your hand, and slowly walks you somewhere you absolutely should not go.

The tension builds slowly, deliberately, and by the time you realize what’s happening, you’re already emotionally in too deep — just like Celia.

Read this if you like -
Slow burns
Isolated, eerie scenes
Cult dynamics

This is the book I wanted Obstetrix to be.

Gailey gets into the cult/believer mindset through a group of people on a strange island. There isn't a page of the book that isn't dedicated to the theme, and yet nothing feels handed out.

Since 2020, I've struggled with multiple perspectives, but didn't do so here: Gailey moves from character to character, uncaring whether they are head-hopping, But these looks into these characters' thoughts don't tell us who they "are." Why would it? People–real people–are complex animals. Even when they have blatant motivations, like our main character Celia, they are not only defined by those motivations. There's always more to learn and, ultimately, each person is unknowable.

Still, we follow Celia, as best as you can follow anyone, as she learns about the people of Kindred Cove, how they work, they how interact. There are times you think, "Well, that's a good idea"–and then you realize you, too, are susceptible.

Great book. I'm going to think about it for a long time.

Make Me Better is a timely book that explores the allure of connection and community and the ways in which our desire to feel seen can leave us susceptible to violence of both the body and the mind. Sarah Gailey has brought us an extraordinary read where the sense of dread never seems to let up and the reader, like many of the characters, finds themselves pulled relentlessly forward all while knowing only horror waits there. I'll be thinking about this one for a long time.

Sarah Gailey is a master of atmospheric storytelling, and MAKE ME BETTER is another example of that. Many of the scenes in this nail-biting, uncomfortable story will stick with me.

This is the second book I've read in the last few months that deals with being a small part of a greater whole. Don't we all just want to belong? To be part of something greater than ourselves? Anna North's "Bog Queen" asks where humans fit in the long history of the world, what humans owe to the collective on the macro and micro scale. The moss will outlive us, despite our best efforts. Maybe not the best comparison, they're very different books. But the idea of the collective, the community, is a hot one right now.

Sarah Gailey's "Make Me Better" instead asks who can be seduced by the collective when the collective is harmful. Celia just wants to belong, to fall in love, to not be left the way she has been left, through no fault of her own. I think we can all see Celia for what she is, a traumatized, lonely person, even if the book doesn't explore that in a direct, therapeutic way. Making her the perspective character adds a certain weight to the book, since Celia isn't an outsider looking for fault. She's an outsider looking to belong.

There's a part toward the end where the book really spells out what it's been trying to tell you for 300+ pages, but that seems to be the norm now, and I'm not sure I can continue to hate it. It isn't going anywhere. But it also shows the direct change in Celia's thinking that is, truly, only a minor shift. We're all just a small push from looking away, since we do it so much in our daily lives.

I don't usually write this much about books. This is one I tore through as quickly as I could, partly because of the sense of foreboding, and partly because I just really wanted to see what was up with this island and this culty community. I've been thinking about it a lot, and I'll probably be thinking about it for a long time.

Oh, and if you usually skip the acknowledgements, don't skip these.

Make Me Better is a book about devotion, hunger, and the need to belong. It explores predatory communities, and the things people will do to stay within them, despite everything. Gailey’s superpower, as an author, is their boundless empathy for their characters, even as they make terrifying, terrible choices. They have a deep understanding of people; no matter how strong or perfect or sad or broken any one of us might feel or seem, on some fundamental level we’re all the same.