Sisterhood and tragic ghostly memories and personified houses - Her Little Flowers was an atmospheric & emotional gothic horror story.

We follow reclusive Francine, who manages her family manor alone with an array of friendly ghosts. She’s startled by the sign in her tea leaves that an enemy is on the way - and then is disgruntled to receive her estranged sister Madeline. But Maddie has some new information about the sisters’ family history, and the two of them must prepare to confront the cruelty of the past in order to understand the haunting of the present.

There’s a beautiful throughline of flower symbolism, and I was fascinated by the way Francine viewed everyone in her life through a floral lens. I was dying to know what my own flower would be!

The house really comes to life on the page - through the intensity of Francine’s fears and buried memories, through the ghosts that stalk its halls, and through Francine’s stubbornness to renovate and get rid of vintage quirks.

This is a powerful story of sisterhood - of sisters protecting each other until the bitter end. Ghosts and memories entwine and family hauntings are as real as they are symbolic.

My one stumble here was that the writing was a tad clunky - many sentences were awkward and the dialogue was sometimes stilted as well, which made my immersive reading journey more difficult.

CW: child abuse, child death, domestic abuse, death of a loved one, alcoholism, confinement, misogyny, toxic relationship, forced institutionalization, murder, grief, gaslighting, animal death, psychosis

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(I received a free copy of this book; this is my honest review.)