Don’t start Our Crooked Hearts unless you have time to finish it.

It’s such a wonderful, spooky, thrilling story that it’s hard to put down. It’s a book about imperfect parents, teenage dissatisfaction, and female empowerment and it unfolds beautifully. It’s also a remarkable ghost story.

While this book has horror elements to it, it wasn’t especially scary and would be appropriate for a teen. I do want to warn readers about some violence to animals:

Half of the book is also set in Chicago in (approximately) the 90’s and features teenage witches. The teenage witches in the 90’s piece gave me hardcore nostalgia for The Craft.

There are two main characters and two time periods that chapters alternate between. One protagonist is Ivy, a seventeen-year-old living in the present day. The other is her mother, Dana, whose chapters go back to her 90’s teen years.

When the book opens Ivy is driving home from a party with her ex-boyfriend Nate (she broke up with him at said party) who is drunk and angry. His driving is reckless and he almost hits a naked woman standing in the road. They search the woman out, but flee when her behavior can only be described as “creepy” and she starts calling to Ivy by name. This one event sets into motion a conflict that reveals to Ivy–and the reader–troubling secrets her mother has held for years.

Ivy has always felt that something about her mother was “off,” and that something was buried deep inside herself. The next night she sees her mother bury something in the yard and digs it up later. It’s a jar containing herbs, paper and blood. She reflects:

I was breathing too fast. My vision sizzled, my head felt helium-light. Not because I was scared of what I’d dug up from the garden, but because I wasn’t. The discovery should have felt alien, appalling. It didn’t. It chimed in grim accord with the feeling I got when [my mother] arranged her hands just so, and the certainty I had glimpsed the rabbit’s tooth in her palm.

There was a quiet place at the center of me. A pool of black water, frozen to a sheen. It was made of questions it was easier not to ask, the mysteries I didn’t bother prodding. I’d been letting it thicken as far back as I could recall. Something was moving beneath the ice now. Shifting, making the surface creak, turning it rotten.

Ivy’s mother is distant from her, and her behavior can be best described as eccentric. Ivy’s brother calls it “new-age white woman” stuff, but to Ivy it feels spookier.

When we get to Dana’s chapters we learn her history. To me, these sections of the book were the most nuanced and fascinating.

Dana was raised by a single father in Chicago, her mother having died when she was a child. Her only friend is Fee, also being raised by a single father, her mother having died in childbirth. Their fathers co-own a fish fry place near the lake, and the girls start working there as young as eight.

Neither Dana or Fee feel like they fit in with other kids. They live at the poverty line, and their fathers, while doing their best, are largely absentee parents. They bond to each other intensely, but are otherwise largely isolated from their peers. That is until Marion starts working at the shop.

At this point all of the girls are teens. They have the run of the city, mostly unsupervised and able to do as they pleased.

Part of why this section worked so well for me was the sense of place. My family is from Chicago, and the author has this incredible talent for describing the city in detail without info- dump. For someone unfamiliar with Chicago, it will create a strong atmosphere. For someone who knows it well, I had moments of “oh, yes, I know this street” and “oh I can almost smell the lake” and “oh I can imagine the food from this vendor.”

Fee, Dana and Marion are a merry band of misfits, but Marion offers the other girls something more. Marion has been studying a book by a long-dead occultist and when the girls are together they are able to perform witchcraft, which they call “the work.” Marion was unable to unlock her powers without Fee and Dana, but now it seems the book speaks to all of them, offering them what they need.

This empowers three girls who have felt powerless up until now. There’s a wonderful scene where they are at the lakefront and a couple of jerks start harassing them. They hex one of them so that whenever a vile thought about women enters his mind, insects fly out of his mouth and bite his face.

They continue to study the book, to become more powerful and to get more involved in the occult community. All of this leads to a terrible secret Dana has kept for decades.

Ivy’s discovery of that secret brings the past-present narratives, and mother and daughter together. I don’t want to say much more about the plot other than it unravels neatly and the pacing is excellent. It’s spooky and thrilling and excellent.

The other thing I liked so much about this novel was that it’s also a book about absentee or bad parents. Ivy’s mother is incredibly distant from her, creating a hurt in her daughter that won’t heal. Fee and Dana’s fathers do their best, but aren’t good parents. The girls are left to run wild, and both their fathers have issues with alcohol and providing an appropriate, stable environment. Fee and Dana also acutely feel the absence of their mothers.

Dana thinks:

I never really knew my mother. She died when I was two, and my dad wasn’t the kind to keep the candle burning. When I asked questions he’d send me to a kitchen drawer where he kept a stack of old photos and a rubber-banded lock of her red hair.

So a mother can be a photograph.

My best friend lost her mother even earlier. Free came into the world and the woman who carried her stepped out. Death transfigured her into a dark-eyed martyr, their apartment a reliquary where Fee’s father tended to her traces.

A mother can be a saint then. A ghost. A blessed outline that shows where she’s gone missing.

Sometimes she’s a stranger on a park bench, feeding her child from her fingers, the air between them so tender you could knead it like bread dough. Or a woman on the train, Coke in a sippy cup and yanking the kid’s arm until it cries. I’ve always liked to watch bad mothers.

A mother can be a paring knife, a chisel. She can shape and destroy; I never really thought I’d become one.

None of the parents in this book can be described as good parents, but they also aren’t bad people. They are imperfect and passing down what is likely generational trauma. Our Crooked Hearts does a wonderful job exploring a gray area that reflects real life. Some parents, not out of malice, don’t know how to be parents which is still harmful to the child. That’s a hard space to navigate.

Ivy struggles with this most, feeling anger toward her mother while acknowledging her mother didn’t actively mean to cause her harm. It’s a complex mother-daughter relationship I don’t see often in fiction.

The complexity of that relationship, the atmosphere of Chicago in the 90’s, the depiction of teenagers heady on newfound power all make this book stand out. It’s almost like the creepy, ghosty thriller angle is just a bonus and that’s marketed as the main part of the book.

I can’t recommend Our Crooked Hearts enough. It may well be the best book of the year for me.