Disclaimer: I received an ARC of this book from the publisher.

This is a very fast-paced short horror novella centered around a cursed island and a family lost at sea.
There is a Dual POV as the story follows a sister and a brother on their journey to find each other again. The Dual POV worked really well in giving us interesting insights into the lives of the characters and made them feel very realistic to me.
The story itself is quite short and moves rather fast, which is fine since this is a novella. However, there are quite a few fight scenes that felt too long compared with the rest of the story and so sometimes I did hope for the story to move faster or that the rest of the story had delved into as much detail as the highly descriptive fight/injury scenes did. The switch in pacing made it a bit hard for me to stay focussed at times unfortunately.
Other than that I quite enjoyed the story and particularly the horror was really interesting. It was just explored enough to make sense without dragging the story out and so that was done really well. I also always enjoy a good botanical horror and the author's background in biology did shine through beautifully. I liked the dread the story built and as I already mentioned we get a lot of character building for our two main POVs and so it was easy to care for them and to journey along their fight for survival.
One tiiiiny little nitpick moment that kinda threw me is the fact that when Sybil joins the pirate crew she does so calling herself Mark Read and at that point I was expecting the story to go in a completely different direction. This however just seems to be a little nod towards lady pirates and has nothing to do with the Mary Read of history. This just as a little warning for other Read-ers (:P) so you can adjust your expectations accordingly, since I was just sitting there wondering what purpose the name served.
All in all an enjoyable little novella and a very fast read with really fun botanical horror and an interesting curse.

I also enjoyed that trigger warnings are provided in the novella (death of a parent, alcohol abuse, murder, violence, attempted sexual assault, sexist insults and gore), but I would like to add a little extra trigger warning for contemplation of suicide. Potentially this has already been added to non-ARC versions of the book, but I just felt it necessary to provide it here myself.