The Mad Sisters of Esi feels less like reading a novel and more like being pulled into a waking dream that keeps rearranging itself while you’re inside it. It's epic and surreal and so devastatingly beautiful.

Everything in this story breathes. Memory breathes. Myth breathes. Grief breathes. Even the world itself feels alive in a way that’s beautiful and deeply unsettling. The setting is surreal and cosmic, yet somehow emotionally intimate at the same time. Entire places feel constructed out of longing and history rather than stone or logic, and the result is a world that constantly feels as if it's on the verge of transforming into something else.

And Mehta's writing is what makes it all hit so hard. The prose is lyrical without losing emotional sharpness. It constantly drifts between the surreal and the painfully human so seamlessly that the strangeness of the world, just, is. There are portions that read like folklore, others philosophical, and then a single line will land out of nowhere and knock you completely on your ass. She writes in a way that she's trusting us as readers to sit with the uncertainty and take from it whatever resonates with us.

For me, what affected me most is how relentlessly the book explores yearning!

Every character is reaching toward something just beyond them: another person, a lost home, an explanation, a version of themselves that existed before everything changed. And the cruel part is that the closer they get, the more they realize nothing can ever be recovered exactly as it was. Time alters people. Distance alters love. Memory alters truth. The only guaranty is the inevitability of change.

This book understands that grief is not always loud. Sometimes it’s simply the refusal to stop searching.

The relationships completely wrecked me. So many of these characters love each other imperfectly but intensely, carrying loneliness and tenderness in the same breath. The story never separates care from pain because, here, they are constantly intertwined. People hurt each other while trying to protect each other. They misunderstand each other while desperately wanting connection. Everyone is carrying different versions of reality, and somehow all of them are emotionally true.

There’s also something incredible about the way the novel handles stories themselves. Legends, histories, personal memories, rumors; they all blur together until it becomes impossible to tell where truth ends and interpretation begins. The book keeps asking whether meaning comes from accuracy or from the act of carrying stories forward at all.

And emotionally? This thing escalates into absolute devastation.

By the end, I felt like the book had quietly dismantled every stable thing beneath my feet: identity, home, memory, even the idea that people remain singular and unchanged across a lifetime. Yet despite all of that uncertainty, the story never feels hopeless. It feels achingly human. Because even when nothing stays fixed, people continue reaching for one another anyway. We are gluttons for punishment because at our base, we hold on to hope, and this books screams that with every word.

I closed this book feeling emotionally haunted in the best possible way. It understood that some questions are too large to resolve cleanly. Some stories don’t end when you finish them. They just move in and start living inside you.

And I know should I do a re-read at some point, I will be devastated in new and beautiful ways.

As a Hapa Hawaiian born and raised in Hawaii and trying my hardest to raise my family here, That Which Feeds Us was a deeply personal reading experience.

What initially drew me in was the Hawaiian setting, language, and cultural references woven throughout the story. From the inclusion of ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi, iwi kūpuna, and Hawaiian history to discussions of identity, belonging, and cultural loss, this felt like a story grounded in place rather than one that simply used Hawaiʻi as a backdrop.

One of the strongest aspects of the novel is how it explores the tension between Hawaiʻi as home and Hawaiʻi as commodity. The story repeatedly asks who gets to tell a place’s story, who benefits from controlling that narrative, and what is lost when culture is reduced to something consumable. The conversations around colonization, land ownership, erasure, and reconnecting with one’s heritage resonated with me deeply.

Lehua’s journey especially struck a chord. Her shame at not knowing enough, coupled with her desire to learn, felt incredibly familiar. I appreciated that the book acknowledged how complicated cultural identity can be for people who have become disconnected from their roots while also affirming that curiosity, learning, and reconnection matter.

At the same time, this is very much a gothic horror element to the novel. What begins as a slow sense of unease gradually transforms into something far darker. The isolated island setting, unsettling power dynamics, lingering ghosts of the past, and growing sense that the land itself remembers create an atmosphere that becomes increasingly claustrophobic and unnerving.

I should also note that I’m fairly new to gothic horror as a genre, so I’m still learning what works best for me within it. Compared to some of the other gothic horror novels I’ve read, this one didn’t maintain the same level of foreboding and dread that I was expecting throughout much of the story, with that feeling becoming much more pronounced toward the end.

That said, I wonder how much of that came down to my own reading experience. I was so invested in the cultural aspects of the novel, the Hawaiian history, language, identity, and conversations around colonization and belonging—that those elements often took center stage for me. Rather than reading primarily as a horror novel, I found myself engaging with it as a story about place, memory, and cultural survival that happened to be wrapped in gothic horror.

What ultimately stayed with me was the novel’s commitment to the idea expressed in the ʻōlelo noʻeau: He Aliʻi Ka ʻĀina; He Kauwā ke Kanaka: The land is chief; man is its servant. The story stands in direct opposition to the mindset that land can be owned, exploited, and stripped of its history without consequence.

This is a novel about grief, memory, identity, and the stories people tell to justify what they have taken. It is also a reminder that history is not finished, that culture survives, and that remembering can be an act of resistance.

Mai poina. Don’t forget.

There’s something surreal about reading someone else’s story and recognizing yourself in the spaces between the details.

What My Bones Know is deeply personal, but what stayed with me most was how often I recognized myself in the patterns Stephanie Foo describes. Not necessarily in the specifics of her story, but in the ways trauma can shape the way you move through the world: becoming the “good” child, learning to read the room, taking responsibility for other people’s emotions, throwing yourself into achievement because it’s easier to keep moving than to sit with what you feel, and believing that if you can just do enough, be enough, accomplish enough, you can convince yourself that you’re okay.

What I appreciated most about this memoir is how much space it gives to the contradictions of trauma. You can understand why someone hurt you and still be hurt by what they did. You can love your parents and acknowledge that they weren’t capable of loving you in the way you needed. You can know intellectually that something wasn’t your fault and still find yourself carrying the responsibility for it.

The book also made me think deeply about the ways culture, family expectations, shame, achievement, and the pressure to appear okay can shape how we understand our own suffering. How easily strength can become synonymous with silence. How comparing your pain to someone else’s can convince you that you aren’t allowed to struggle. How protecting your family can sometimes mean protecting the silence around what happened.

What resonated with me most was the book’s understanding of healing as something much less tidy than simply finding an answer and moving on. Understanding your trauma is one thing. Recognizing the ways it continues to influence you is another. Actually changing those patterns requires work: noticing them, practicing something different, and continuing to choose healthier ways of moving through the world even when they feel unfamiliar.

That unfamiliarity really rocked me. When you’re used to chaos, healthy family dynamics can almost seem silly or foreign. People doing goofy things together on holidays. Families who genuinely enjoy being around each other. People expressing affection without having to earn it. There can be something surreal about realizing that what feels completely foreign to you is ordinary to someone else. And healing means learning that you’re allowed to participate in those things, too.

The book is also incredibly honest about how exhausting it can be to seek help in the first place. There is something cruel about having to be well enough to navigate the process of getting better, to keep asking, keep searching, and keep trying when you’re already depleted.

There were certainly moments when I found myself wrestling with the book, but I appreciated that it gave me so much to wrestle with. It made me examine ideas about trauma, family, culture, strength, responsibility, and healing that I have struggled with and will continue to work through.

More than anything, What My Bones Know reminded me that surviving something and healing from it are not the same thing. Sometimes healing means realizing that you were never responsible for carrying what you carried, that needing help doesn’t make you weak, and that you don’t have to keep proving you’re okay. Sometimes it means allowing yourself to want something different and learning, slowly and deliberately, that you’re allowed to have it.

This was a difficult book for me in ways I didn’t always expect, but I think that’s exactly why it will stay with me. Because, It’s in my bones too.