Where Darkness Blooms by Andrea Hannah – Review

Published: February 21, 2023

Publisher: Wednesday Books

Series: N/A

Genre: Horror, Young Adult

Pages: 320 (Hardcover)

My Rating: 2.5 Stars

A copy of this book was provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Synopsis:
Andrea Hannah’s Where Darkness Blooms is a supernatural thriller about an eerie town where the sunflowers whisper secrets and the land hungers for blood.

The town of Bishop is known for exactly two things: recurring windstorms and an endless field of sunflowers that stretches farther than the eye can see. And women—missing women. So when three more women disappear one stormy night, no one in Bishop is surprised. The case is closed and their daughters are left in their dusty shared house with the shattered pieces of their lives. Until the wind kicks up a terrible secret at their mothers’ much-delayed memorial.

With secrets come the lies each of the girls is forced to confront. After caring for the other girls, Delilah would like to move on with her boyfriend, Bennett, but she can’t bear his touch. Whitney has already lost both her mother and her girlfriend, Eleanor, and now her only solace is an old weathervane that seems to whisper to her. Jude, Whitney’s twin sister, would rather ignore it all, but the wind kicks up her secret too: the summer fling she had with Delilah’s boyfriend. And more than anything, Bo wants answers and she wants them now. Something happened to their mothers and the townsfolk know what it was. She’s sure of it.

Bishop has always been a strange town. But what the girls don’t know is that Bishop was founded on blood—and now it craves theirs.

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REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS

The World’s Worst Mother award goes to all three of our four main characters’ mothers! O H  M Y  G O D. I am both dying of the outrageous absurdity of this and also super pissed that their mothers just left them in a town full of psychopaths WHO SACRIFICE WOMEN. Yes, this is a huge spoiler for the end of the book but I need to get this off my chest because I cannot believe what  I just read.

Okay, now that I`ve gotten that little outburst out into the world, let’s back up and talk about the town of Bishop, Kansas and its inhabitants. Bishop is a little town in the middle of nowhere surrounded by endless fields of sunflowers and a suspicious number of women go missing or are found dead. Like, a really suspicious number. Of young, healthy women dying of “natural causes” and everybody is just sad and kind of lives with it, except for a few people and sometimes they go missing or die too. No alarm bells going off here! Defiiiiinitely not any cult stuff or a serial killer – no siree! 

Now, to our group of girls that the story centers around! The four of them have continued to live together in the house that their mothers all shared after their fathers left, even though their mothers disappeared two years ago and they were only 15-16 at the time. Yes, maybe it’s because I’m a sensible adult, but it seems like they should have had some sort of adult supervision or a legal guardian. They’ve been running wild and free, who knows where the money for bills and groceries is coming from! These girls need all kinds of therapy, especially since only six months ago, Whitney’s girlfriend mysteriously died in her front yard. Whitney, Jude, Delilah, and Bo have been understandably suspicious about their mother’s disappearance but nothing has come of their timid attempts at investigation until Bo finds a blood covered knife at “the clearing” where a memorial statue was to be placed. Thus they begin anew, investigating the dark founding of Bishop, and finally snooping through their mothers’ belongings for clues.

So, I have to say first off, that this was a really entertaining book that I read in a single sitting on my day off. I really didn’t want to put it down because each page was some new discovery or dramatic event and I really wanted to see how it ended. Objectively though, it was riddled with plot holes and it wasn’t the least bit creepy after the prologue chapter. The prologue chapter really hooked me though, and I will say that the prose throughout the book flowed really well and there weren’t stilted, awkward bits of dialogue like I often find in these highly binge-able books. I think the cover art is pretty dang awesome as well, and it’s what initially drew me in and then the thought of Midwestern Gothic horror and liminal space sunflower fields really convinced me. I was let down though.

I’d like to give a shout-out to one particularly memorable series of events that leads to Whitney going to the non-existent hospital accompanied by her twin sister Jude and the Harding boys. They literally took her to an abandoned house in the middle of the sunflower field, patched her up, and took her home. While her sister is in the vehicle, declines to go in, and just thinks “what a weird looking hospital”. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, WHY? This isn’t all revealed right away, but comes out a bit later in the book and it’s just the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever read. I’m sorry, this boy with the ability to control the wind has made you that stupid over his good looks? What did he do, lobotimize you? I think this ultimately sums up the overall vibe of this book.