The Place Where They Buried Your Heart

The Place Where They Buried Your Heart by Christina Henry is not only a legitimately scary story, but running through it is an undercurrent of grief and guilt and a fraught mother-daughter relationship.

Every neighborhood has a haunted house, and in thirteen-year-old Jessie’s neighborhood, that’s the McIntyre place, and like any teenager, she just wants her eight-year-old brother Paul to go away so she can listen to her music, so she dares him to go into the McIntyre place just to get him out of her hair for a few hours. She had no way of knowing she would never see him again or that it would destroy her family.

Not long after the house eats her brother - which she firmly believes happened - her father dies while attempting  - unsuccessfully- to burn it to the ground, and her mother’s grief doesn’t have room for Jessie or her grief or teenage needs.

As more people are lost to the house, even the city attempts to raze it but were no more successful than Jessie’s father had been.

Jessie and the neighborhood learn to avoid the house, but when she grows up and has a child of her own, she is forced to confront it once and for all.

The Place Where They Buried Your Heart is the best kind of horror - one that is scarier because of the emotional stakes.

Thank you to NetGalley and Berkley Publishing Group for the review copy.

Support your favorite indie bookstore (and give us both 20% off if it’s your first purchase) by using my link at https://refer.bookshop.org/candidanorwood.