Delicious Monsters by Liselle Sambury

Review

Delicious Monsters is a YA horror novel that follows two young black girls a decade apart: Daisy and Brittney. Daisy can see the dead, a difficult ability to have when you live in a bustling city. But when she and her mom finally move to her mother’s fabled house in Ontario, Daisy begins to count down the days to when she can start to live her life for herself. After all, her mother won’t need her to take care of her and keep them afloat much longer. But her mother has many secrets, and there is something dangerous in the house and it’s out for blood. Ten years later, Brittney and her best friend run a show called Haunted and their next season is exactly the break she needs. With the popularity and revenue, she could finally live on her own without relying on her mother while exposing the lies her mother perpetrated about the so-called Miracle Mansion that cured their abusive relationship. But few people are willing to talk and even fewer want to hear about a forgotten black girl.

This is another book that I have very ambivalent feelings about. It weaves together cycles of trauma and abuse, complicated mother-daughter relationships, violence against black women, depression, and self-love into a story about haunted houses, possession, and a girl who can see the dead. Despite all of this tragedy, there were so many beautiful and moving moments in the story

There were so many amazing parts to this book, but there were other parts that dampened the experience. In the beginning, I was more taken in by Brittney’s storyline than Daisy’s. It takes a very long time to understand what’s happening on Daisy’s end, even though she is the true main character of the story, while Brittney’s was more of a frame to look at Daisy’s life from another perspective. Given the happy endings that everyone experiences, I was hoping that Brittney’s would be more tied-up, especially in terms of her mother. While part of her has clearly healed after her experiences in the investigation, the success of their show and her financial dependence on her mother are left up in the air. Given the twist Sambury is hiding,

it makes sense why Brittney’s parts are much shorter and sparser. However, to me it seemed like her whole story was building up to something, only for it to have been a plot device. I also had so much trouble working my way through the middle portion of the book. Again, this book has a good beginning and ending but the rest felt very inconsequential to the plot. There’s a lot of investigating, running around the house, and trying to discover Grace’s secrets, but it takes so long to get there that a majority of the book felt like a chore to read. I think another part is that I was hoping for more action and thriller, which we don’t get until later. It was disheartening because there were so many great parts at the end of the book and I know a lot of people absolutely loved it.