House of Hollow, by Krystal Sutherland

A lush, decadent YA dark fantasy about three sisters who vanished mysteriously and returned amnesiac and strangely changed.

In the four years since she’d left home, my eldest sister had grown into a gossamer slip of a woman with hair like spun sugar and a face out of Greek mythology. Even in still pictures there was something vaporous and hyaline about her, like she might ascend into the ether at any moment. It was perhaps why journalists were forever describing her as ethereal, though I’d always thought of Grey as more earthy. No articles ever mentioned that she felt most at home in the woods, or how good she was at making things grow. Plants loved her. The wisteria outside her childhood bedroom had often snaked in through the open window and coiled around her fingers in the night.

Either you like this sort of thing or you don't, and even if you do, it's easy to tip from lush to purple. For me, this REALLY worked - I loved it like I loved Dhonielle Clayton's The Belles, another book about too-close sisters possessed of a terrible, toxic beauty. House of Hollow is set in modern London but has a similar deliciously dark, decadent feel, with lots of descriptions of beautiful and creepy clothing, people, and places. I ate it up.

When Iris Hollow was seven, she and her older sisters Vivi (nine) and Grey (eleven) vanished without a trace when her parents glanced away for a moment. They returned a month later, naked and amnesiac, with healing wounds on their throats and no memory of what happened. There were no signs of sexual assault or other abuse. But after that, their blue eyes turned black, their hair went white, and they grew up strange, uncannily beautiful, able to control others, and prone to attracting unwanted attention and stalkers.

The book opens ten years later. Grey (straight) is estranged from their mother (their father is now dead) and has become a supermodel and designer of gorgeous and spooky bespoke clothing. Vivi (lesbian) is a rock singer. Iris (bi) is a student, hoping to avoid the excesses and public gaze of her sisters, unhealthily enmeshed with both her mother and her sisters. Especially Grey. When they were children and Grey accidentally broke her pinky, Iris smashed her own with a hammer.

Then a strange figure, a skull-headed Minotaur, begins to stalk Iris. And Grey disappears...

This dark fairytale hits many of my favorite things: the three sisters, each with their own fascinating attributes, a central mystery WHICH IS SOLVED SATISFYINGLY FOR ONCE, beautiful/horrifying descriptions (corpse flowers play a large role), liminal places and otherworlds, folkore, and even a road trip. It has a reasonable ending but also kind of begs for a sequel, which hopefully will show up at some point.

Content notes: Body horror. Sexualized mind control, both deliberate and accidental, and sexual attacks caused by the latter.