Book Review: Burying the Honeysuckle Girls | Reviving the Hawthorn Sisters | Emily Carpenter

I remembered enjoying Emily Carpenter’s debut novel, Burying the Honeysuckle Girls, back when it first came out. When I had the chance to read a follow up, Reviving the Hawthorn Sisters, I immediately jumped at the chance. In looking back, I realized I never posted a review of the first book, so here you’ll find a mini review of both books. These books are connected by certain elements (and a character or two), but they are separate stories that focus on completely different things.

Burying the Honeysuckle Girls

I read Burying the Honeysuckle Girls a few years ago—before my blog—and I wanted to briefly revisit it before getting into the follow up book, Reviving the Hawthorn Sisters. Told in two timelines, Burying the Honeysuckle Girls is about generations of women plagued with mental health issues and superstitions.

Althea Bell comes from a long line of women who have had a breakdown on their thirtieth birthdays. The superstitions and lore about the Bell women are colored by stories of madness. Althea knows the last three generations of women in her family all succumbed to the darkness that seems to haunt them.

Fresh out of a stint in rehab, Althea has returned home days before her thirtieth birthday. Her father has never shared the details of what happened to her mother, just that she died on the way to Pritchard, a local asylum where she was headed after her breakdown. With her thirtieth birthday approaching, Althea needs to know what happened to her mother.

Unfortunately her father has Alzheimer’s and her brother is running for governor. They don’t want whatever is about to happen to Althea to taint her brother’s opportunity, and he’s looking to have Althea committed to the same asylum where her mother died. Althea turns to her childhood friend Jay for help. Her father told her that her mother died of a brain aneurism, but Jay and Althea look into Pritchard Mental Institution and discover that she was diagnosed with schizophrenia.

On Althea’s thirteenth birthday, her mother was dying and told Althea to “wait for the honeysuckle girl” who will find her. Althea has a box of items her mother left her with, and she uses those clues to search for answers to the mysteries that plagued the women in her family. Where did they all disappear to and what really happened to them on their thirtieth birthdays?

I was pulled into Althea’s story, and I enjoyed the flashbacks to her great-grandmother’s story—Jinn, the original honeysuckle girl—nearly a century earlier. The women in this family experience quite a bit of trauma from the men in their lives. Southern gothic vibes and tragedy make this a haunting, compelling read.

Reviving the Hawthorn Sisters

“Sometimes you’ve got to tear something down before you can build it back up again.”

Based on hearing they were connected, I expected Reviving the Hawthorn Sisters to be a sequel to Burying the Honeysuckle Girls, but it really isn’t. These are standalone novels that are linked by a thread, but can be read alone or in either order.

Similar to Burying the Honeysuckle Girls, this is a multigenerational story set in Alabama. In the present timeline, Eve Chandler is searching for answers about her grandmother, Dove Jarrod. Dove was a famous faith healer and evangelist in the 1930s. She passed away eight years earlier, leaving Eve to maintain the charitable foundation that Dove started. Dove wasn’t the person that many thought, though. She was a con artist hiding many secrets from the public. A documentary team has been shooting a film about the miracle worker, but someone else besides Eve knows what dark secrets Dove was hiding.

Flashing back to 1934, a young orphan escapes the Prichard psychiatric institution where she was born. She was expected to live there even after her mother’s tragic death in the facility. That young woman was Dove, and she went on to build a name for herself as a healer. In between those, Dove reinvents herself as she needs to in order to survive. At one point, she became a singer with the Hawthorn Sisters, but there was always a man following her every move.

Now that Dove has died and Eve is holding her secrets, the man that followed Dove has turned his sights on Eve. Eve is looking for answers, but can she unravel the truth about what her grandmother is being accused of? And what will it mean for her future?

This has a similar vibe as Burying the Honeysuckle Girls, though it lacked a small part of the magic of that book. In the first book, I was equally invested in Althea’s story as I was her great-grandmother Jinn’s. In this book, I felt much more invested in Dove’s story and Eve’s. Eve didn’t have the same character development as Althea did, for starters. Althea also had her own story, but Eve’s story was more about Dove than about Eve.

The southern gothic vibes that I loved in the debut book were just as wonderful in Reviving the Hawthorn Sisters. This book also had a slight air of the supernatural to it, in addition to the mystery. Steeped in family secrets, this was not quite as sad as I found the first book. The tension kept me hooked, despite some dispersion in the plot that took awhile to get the hang of. There were much less heavy themes in this book as well, which made the tone lighter but also detracted from the weight of the story for me. Carpenter’s writing and poignant storytelling kept me interested.

Another great mystery by Emily Carpenter, this was an easy and engaging read. I liked that Dove was such an elusive character in the book. Though Eve seemed to know her best, it also sometimes felt like Eve didn’t really know Dove at all.

Final Thoughts

The multigeneration spin, the southern gothic vibes, the setting in Alabama, and the emphasis on family secrets are the threads that hold these two books together (and the psychiatric facility). Each book has a different story to tell about a different family. I personally connected more with Burying the Honeysuckle Girls, but I’ve seen several readers say the opposite and they preferred Reviving the Hawthorn Sisters. These are easy reads and both are available through Kindle Unlimited if you subscribe and have the audiobook option available.

Fans of multigenerational stories and women’s fiction will love these books!