THIS BOOK IS SO GOOD!!!

Although I DID forget how diabolical Sara Hashem's endings were and what she did to us in The Jasad Crown...DIABOLICAL. I reread the last few pages a couple of times and then stared at my ceiling for a few minutes. UNbelievable.

If you knew me, a high school romance horror book is not something I would have picked up BUT because it was Sara Hashem I did, and I'm SO glad I did. To say that I loved this book means a lot. I would read anything written by this author and she is top of the auto-buy author list.

Bullet points for those short on time:

YA Supernatural Horror
Main First-Person POV, Minor Third-Person POV
High school seniors
Egyptian family lore and history
Slow burn cis het romance (low on the chili pepper scale)
Generational curses

Summary:

The story centers around Mina, a 17-year-old small-town Southern-Californian homecoming queen that is being haunted/hunted by something that followed her home after a visit to her aunt in Egypt/Masr. If she is left alone with someone, the THING possesses them and then tries to kill her...so you can imagine she loses her friends and current boyfriend pretty quickly, becoming a loner. Finding that fellow school loner, Jesse, is immune to the possession, she enlists his help to figure out what's happening. Even as Mina discovers Jesse has plenty of secrets of his own, the two try to find more about Mina's family history (including her mother's mysterious death) and how she might stay alive and get rid of the haunt before senior year is over.

Thoughts:

The order and layering of timelines in this book is fantastic. Each chapter uncovers more secrets and family lore until everything is completely unravelling and there's nothing we can do about it except face the truth...face what the ancestors have done and how we pay for it now.

Where No Shadow Stays asks a deeper question than what happens when a homecoming queen and bad boy loner come together to solve a mystery and fight a dangerous entity. It asks, if you could thrive at the expense of others, would you willingly choose to? Would you knowingly throw others under the bus so you could survive another day? Would you feed them to the beast so that you may live and live well? And how that trancends and builds over generations so that an entire group of people is reliant on sacrificing another group of people for gains...and also sometimes how desperate things must be in certain cases for people to make that choice in the first place. Or that shadows often seek out the easiest prey...and is there really a choice after all?

"They make us mortal so they could be everlasting"

It's timely and brilliant. Subtle in some ways and not in others.

There's also a poignant discussion around straddling two identities or worlds or heritages/histories, how racism and xenophobia shows up in many places including schools. Students being treated differently by teachers for example. There's a beautiful quote I can't not share here from this book:

"We aren't spare parts of an identity or uneven pieces struggling to fit everywhere they're placed. We will never be fully one or the other, but we can be something third. Something new and special and just as whole as those who came before us."

Another part of this book I adored was seeing Mina grow, even in the short time this book covers, into a version of herself that she thinks she might like better than a previous identity she grieved.

On the YA category:

Keep in mind this book is YA about seniors in high school. They are going to be a bit immature or not as mature as you would expect to find in books marketed to the adult category. That being said, I would read more YA if more YA books were written like this. There is a level of maturity to the writing style that doesn't annoy me at all. When I have read YA in the past, often authors write kids who are incredibly immature and childish in a really annoying way. This isn't that. So, if you have been put off YA in the past, I would encourage you to give this book a chance!

Last words:

This is one of those books that will haunt my heart for a long time to come. I HIGHLY recommend it but don't say I didn't warn you...

Thank you to Holiday House for the ARC copy for review consideration. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Release date: March 31, 2026

Content Warnings

Child death, death of parent, murder, hauntings, possession, violence, mild sexual content

About the Author

This is Sara's YA debut. If you like fantasy, check out her duology, The Scorched Throne for another amazing read!!

This book could have been something really special if it hadn't romanticized sexual assault and flagrant disregard of consent by multiple characters.

Heiress of Nowhere follows Lucy, an orphan-ward of unknown parentage, as she tries to adjust to unexpectedly inheriting a massive estate and business from her murdered employer/benefactor as well as discovering the culprit behind the grisly event.

She also seems to have a special connection to the "sea wolves" (orcas) who may or may not be involved in the mystery that surrounds her origins and potentially her employers murder.

If the "romantic" parts/scenes/thoughts, especially the internal monologues, were removed, this would be a great book. It has an interesting and varied cast of characters and potential subjects. There is Indigenous, Chinese, Japanese representation and history. There is discussion around environmental and industrial impacts. The mystery and story itself was compelling and adventurous.

And in my opinion, ruined and completely overshadowed by the "romance" included where one young woman is pitted between two men. Where she loses her mind whenever one of them appears. Where they "save the day" when she is more than capable of doing so. It's cliche and frustrating.

Additionally, there is a lack of respect for consent on the part of the two men in at least two separate instances in the book. It's sexual assault but the female character finds it romantic which is disturbing.

I cannot recommend this book for this reason and find it dissapointing that the above content as described is within where otherwise it would have been great.