Sally Hepworth’s Darling Girls is a feverish thriller rife with gaslighting and unreliable narrators, perfect for fans of Freida McFadden or Loreth Anne White.
Jessica, Norah and Alicia grew up in the same foster home, Wild Meadows, with a seemingly perfect foster mother, Miss Fairchild. When the novel opens, the now-adult women are all struggling thanks to what they endured in Miss Fairchild’s “care.” But when Wild Meadows is demolished and human remains are found underneath it, the ensuing investigation forces the three sisters to excavate their own complicated memories of what happened there.
Hepworth cannily builds this novel around the understanding that childhood trauma doesn’t always make sense to adult eyes. Each of the sisters’ experiences with Miss Fairchild are horrific in slightly different, almost inconceivable ways, leaving readers feeling like they are participating in some kind of collective hallucination. All three sisters have memories of babies being brought into the home, then disappearing at night. All three claim to have lived with a toddler named Amy—except the only Amy that existed in the house, according to police, was a doll. Hepworth’s deep dives into the point of view of each character keeps things feeling off-kilter and unmoored. As the tale of their spooky and bizarre childhood at Wild Meadows unfolds, we can’t help but wonder if the sisters’ odd experiences are a means of covering up their involvement in something dire. This is a novel where no one can be trusted at their word: Even as adults, the sisters are all still unreliable narrators. Jessica is addicted to Valium, Norah has severe anger issues that manifest as violence and Alicia has buried her past in a way that can only end in crisis.
Extremely dark without ever showing violence on the page, Darling Girls portrays the horrors of psychological abuse, but the novel also offers catharsis. Jessica, Norah and Alicia survived a horrible ordeal. The discovery of the bones under Wild Meadows is the catalyst for them to be able to tell their story and begin to heal.
With an emphasis on psychological versus physical terror, Darling Girls is a one-sitting read full of twists and turns.
