Instead, he wants his girls to finally start enjoying themselves again, and he begins with the purchase of new dancing shoes for all of them. Their stepmother Morella is pregnant, finally, with a boy, and – in a shocking departure from custom – their father has decreed that he’s had enough of mourning. The problem is that nobody will listen to her suspicions. But Eulalie would never have gone onto the cliffs at night, and a fisherman tells her that he saw a dark figure fleeing from the cliffs just after Eulalie fell. The first three deaths can be explained away. Annaleigh doesn’t believe in the curse, but she’s certainly beginning to become suspicious. Rumours are beginning to go around that the Thamus girls, daughters of Ortun, 12th Duke of the Salann Islands, are cursed.

Lastly are the three youngest sisters, the Graces: Mercy, Honor, and Verity.

The triplets – Lenore, Rosalie, and Ligeia – are sixteen and more like one person than three individual ones.

Camille, the eldest survivor, is now the heir.

Eulalie, the latest death, fell from the highest cliffs, smashing onto the rocks below.

Elizabeth was found dead in a bathtub – whether suicide or accident, none can tell.

Octavia fell off a library ladder and broke her neck.

Of the twelve original sisters, only eight are left. Since she was a young child, death has been her constant companion: first her mother died in childbirth, and now – one by one – all her sisters are dying. The novel opens with the narrator, nineteen-year old Annaleigh Thaumas, at the funeral of yet another one of her sisters. This book is like a sugar flower: it looks gorgeous and delicate (and the writing certainly was) but there’s no substance underneath. When Annaleigh’s involvement with a mysterious stranger who has secrets of his own intensifies, it’s a race to unravel the darkness that has fallen over her family-before it claims her next.ĪRC received in exchange for an honest review – thank you! Because who-or what-are they really dancing with? Her sisters have been sneaking out every night to attend glittering balls, dancing until dawn in silk gowns and shimmering slippers, and Annaleigh isn’t sure whether to try to stop them or to join their forbidden trysts.

Each death was more tragic than the last-the plague, a plummeting fall, a drowning, a slippery plunge-and there are whispers throughout the surrounding villages that the family is cursed by the gods.ĭisturbed by a series of ghostly visions, Annaleigh becomes increasingly suspicious that the deaths were no accidents. Once they were twelve, but loneliness fills the grand halls now that four of the girls’ lives have been cut short. In a manor by the sea, twelve sisters are cursed.Īnnaleigh lives a sheltered life at Highmoor, a manor by the sea, with her sisters, their father, and stepmother.

The house of salt and sorrow