A mother and her two teenage daughters relocate to a remote cottage by the sea for a fresh start only to discover that what they've brought with them may be worse than what they left behind. Sisters September and July are unusually close. Less than a year apart in age, the girls share a language of preferences, games, sometimes even thoughts that makes their mother, Sheela, feel excluded and that causes their teachers to categorize them as "isolated, uninterested, conjoined, young for their age, sometimes moved to great cruelty." The children's father, Peter, is dead, drowned in a hotel pool while on vacation, but the memory of his capricious cruelty haunts Sheela and taints her enjoyment of her oldest daughter, September, who strongly resembles him. Nevertheless, the family makes a life together in Oxford, where their mother writes and illustrates children's books featuring the girls' fictional adventures. Then, something dreadful happens, something so awful that July can't remember what exactly it was, and they flee to Settle House, the cottage where their father was conceived and September was born, high on the North York Moors by the sea. Once there, the girls are left on their own while Sheela locks herself in her room, emerging only sometimes at night to cook meals, which she leaves for them to eat by themselves. Isolated by the lonely moors that surround them and by their mother's near abandonment, which the girls take as anger over what happened in Oxford, September and July's already claustrophobic relationship becomes something verging on a possession as July's identity is slowly sublimated under the more dominant personality of her sister and the smothering nature of the house itself. When the instigating event that caused them to leave Oxford finally comes to light, it does so with an incandescence that reilluminates everything that has come before; what the reader and July herself should have seen all along, if only we had known how to look. Johnson--whose first novel, Everything Under (2018), made her the youngest author ever shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize--brings her nuanced sense of menace and intimate understanding of the perils of loving too much to this latest entry in her developing canon of dark places where the unspeakable speaks and speaks. A subtle book that brings to bear all its author's prodigious skill. A must-read. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Johnson (Everything Under) returns with a well-crafted, consistently surprising psychological thriller. September and July are teenage sisters, born 10 months apart. After an incident at their Oxford school, its dark details hinted at as the story unfolds, their mother, Sheela, whisks them away to the dilapidated house where September was born, on the desolate coast of the North York Moors, and holes up in her room, ill-advisedly leaving July at the mercy of her sister. September bullies, intimidates, and cruelly manipulates the passive, compliant July, daring her to perform increasingly dangerous acts in the form of games like "September Says." September taunts a man who comes to set up their internet, and when the girls get online, they seduce men on dating sites and pretend to have entrapped them as part of a police sting. Sheela, meanwhile, writes and illustrates children's picture books, and her deep depression contributes to her neglectful parenting ("I will always love you, she says. And if you need me you come get me. But I need some time," July narrates). The sisters share an eerie, symbiotic relationship; they seem at times to share a single consciousness, and even a single body. In achingly lyrical prose, Johnson employs alternating narratives, divulging and withholding information by turns, keeping the reader unsure of what to believe. When the revelations hit, they are intensely powerful. Readers of classic gothic fiction will find a contemporary master of the craft here. (Aug.)

Their teachers say the two girls are isolated, uninterested, conjoined, young for their age, sometimes moved to great cruelty. The two are teenage sisters, September and July, so close they often share thoughts, which pass through the skin like an electric current. September is the older by 10 months and always the ringleader. Their favorite game when they were young was called September Says, in which July had to do whatever September told her to do. When readers meet the two, something terrible has happened at their school in Oxford, something so traumatic that July cannot remember it, although it is the reason they have left Oxford to move into a dilapidated family house near the sea on the side of the North York Moors. Their depressive mother, a children's picture-book author and illustrator, has always known that houses are bodies, and this house into which they're moving is the house where September was born. Johnson's character-driven novel is told, in part, in July's first-person voice, and, in part, from the third-person viewpoint of their mother, Sheela. Their relentlessly dark, very interior stories move backward and forward in time and, as the novel proceeds, become ever more fevered and seemingly, almost suffocatingly, unmoored from reality. The story is beautifully written, the characters expertly drawn, as is the setting, the house becoming a character in itself. A memorable and haunting novel.

Gr 9 Up--Shirley Jackson meets E. Lockhart's We Were Liars in this literary gothic novel. Teenage sisters July and September, less than ten months apart in age, were named for their birth months. Older sister September has always been in charge, with July dutifully taking a supporting role. Following a mysterious and sinister event, the girls move with their depressed single mother (she is Indian; their father is Danish) to a creepy old family home on the shore. The events that led to this move are initially obscured from readers, with the author's breadcrumb trail of clues providing much of the book's suspense. Much like the sisters in Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle and the heroine of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, July slowly comes undone through the weight of repressed memories, family secrets, and an extremely creepy house. Johnson brings a contemporary literary style to these classic tropes, meshing a 21st-century situation with elements of timeless gothic spookiness. The book's big twist may be expected to fans of thrillers and gothic literature, but still resonates. The slow pace and at times fractured narrative style may be challenging for younger teen readers, but those with a knowledge of gothic literary tropes will find much to savor in this book. VERDICT A thought-provoking, atmospheric exploration of sibling rivalry, grief, and the multifaceted inner lives of teen girls.--Ann Foster, Saskatoon P.L., Sask.

The youngest author ever short-listed for the Man Booker Prize--and for her debut, Everything Under, at that--Johnson here limns the story of sisters July and September, born just ten months apart and closer than a clenched fist. A bullying incident has their single mother pulling them from school and moving them all to a long-empty (and slightly spooky) family home near the shore, where September senses July tugging away even as an encounter with the outside world spins them on a whole new path.