Sarah O'Connor

“You’re searching for something profound. Something to tug at your heartstrings…The house is an animal. And it wants to feed,” (Samsbury 234).

Daisy can see the dead. It’s an ability she’s had all her life which makes living in ghost-filled Toronto difficult. She usually has a handle on it, but when her boyfriend suddenly dumps her the dead come for her sadness. But when the uncle she’s never met dies and leaves Daisy and her mother his huge mansion in Timmins, Daisy sees it as the perfect opportunity to start again. This is the moment she and her mom have been waiting for, a chance for them out of their tiny apartment and to stop worrying about money and maybe, for Daisy, a chance at freedom. But her mom won’t let her in the mansion and she won’t tell her why, and the house turns out much different than it seems, Ten years later Brittney decides to investigate the “Miracle Mansion” that to the world reformed her abusive mother into the caring woman she markets herself as in her book, but Brittney knows better. She believes that if she can find out what happened to another young Black girl in the mansion a decade before she can expose her mother for the abusive woman she still is. But is Brittney seeing the story correctly or letting her own bias seep through?

Delicious Monsters is a stellar novel and one that needs to be on your reading list. I loved that it was set in Canada and think Samsbury did an excellent job differentiating between the beginning in Toronto and the move to Timmins, both settings were easy to visualize, and I liked the subtle change in dialect as Daisy learned of terms like the bush and bunkie to show the way that words can change in the same province. I also liked how Daisy was the main point of view we followed, she was an intriguing protagonist and I liked getting inside of her head, seeing how her ability to see the dead affected her as a person and her relationships with others. I also enjoyed the secondary point of view of Brittney and how her she struggled to separate herself from Daisy, so used to not trusting people because of her own abusive mother that she couldn’t tell whether or not Daisy’s mom was abusive or not.

The book is a great haunted house read, it’s such a malevolent and terrifying building that I was completely drawn through. But the book isn’t just about a haunted house, it’s about what haunts the characters and how this affects their lives. It’s a mystery, putting together the pieces of what Samsbury gives us so the larger things are obvious. As other Goodreads reviewers have said, readers may be disappointed because there isn’t really a twist, or the twist is easy to predict, and as other reviewers have said that’s the point. A mystery doesn’t have to have a twist to make it good, arguably an author should be able to leave out the pieces and the reader should be able to put them together. A mystery should be solvable, and the one in Delicious Monsters is, and I enjoyed every moment I got to solve it.

Samsbury’s writing is strong and she’s created a horror that explores trauma and how it roots in and changes people, how those cycles can continue in a seemingly endless cycle that needs to end. Delicious Monsters is a book that you’ll want to devour, I hope you’re hungry for it!

Publication: February 28th 2023
Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry Books
Pages: 512 pages (Hardcover)
Source: Library
Genre: Fiction, Young Adult, Horror, Mystery
My Rating: ⛤⛤⛤⛤
Summary:

Daisy sees dead people—something impossible to forget in bustling, ghost-packed Toronto. She usually manages to deal with her unwanted ability, but she’s completely unprepared to be dumped by her boyfriend. So when her mother inherits a secluded mansion in northern Ontario where she spent her childhood summers, Daisy jumps at the chance to escape. But the house is nothing like Daisy expects, and she begins to realize that her experience with the supernatural might be no match for her mother’s secrets, nor what lurks within these walls…
A decade later, Brittney is desperate to get out from under the thumb of her abusive mother, a bestselling author who claims her stay at “Miracle Mansion” allowed her to see the error of her ways. But Brittney knows that’s nothing but a sham. She decides the new season of her popular Haunted web series will uncover what happened to a young Black girl in the mansion ten years prior and finally expose her mother’s lies. But as she gets more wrapped up in the investigation, she’ll have to decide: if she can only bring one story to light, which one matters most—Daisy’s or her own?
As Brittney investigates the mansion in the present, Daisy’s story runs parallel in the past, both timelines propelling the girls to face the most dangerous monsters of all: those that hide in plain sight.