Beautiful. Rich. Mysterious.

The Roanoke girls seem to have it all. But there’s a dark truth about them which is never spoken. Every girl either runs away, or dies.

Lane is one of the lucky ones. When she was fifteen, over one long, hot summer at her grandparents’ estate in rural Kansas, she found out what it really means to be a Roanoke girl. Lane ran, far and fast. Until eleven years later, when her cousin Allegra goes missing – and Lane has no choice but to go back.

She is a Roanoke girl.

Is she strong enough to escape a second time?

The Roanoke Girls is the best book I have read this year.

Creepy, suffocating, dark, addictive and twisted.

I read this in a kind of trance, my throat closing up in horror. Some parts I enjoyed: characters such as Cooper who had me laughing, curious and willing for something good to happen, for him and Lane to find one another and for their lives to get better.

Other parts, especially regarding the Roanoke girls themselves and their secretive, destructive cult, were claustrophobic, disgusting, and left me wondering what on earth I had just read. But still, I couldn’t stop reading.

The setting was perfectly imagined; so tangible you could almost see the waves of heat, and hear the flies buzzing around your ears. It fitted the events and mood of the story so perfectly. The sticky, heavy heat of Kansas only added to the stifling, trapping atmosphere of the novel.

There is also a pent-up, fiery anger that underlies every word and it’s masterfully subtle; things are always hinted at but never explained and a lot of sad confusion and destruction surrounds all the relationships.

The world of the Roanoke girls is taboo-breaking, darkly sensual, downright depressing, and at times, it feels as though you cannot breathe from the sadness of it. But you just cannot. Stop. Reading. The Roanoke Girls is a beautifully written tale of the dark, dangerous secrets families keep and the self-destructive sadness that can follow. There is suspense, heartbreak, shock and the revelation that every one is slightly broken, and that sometimes, that’s okay.