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.

Some stories about grief ask how you move on. To Ghosts & Gravity asks whether “moving on” was ever the right question. It understands that grief is never one emotion. It is all of them. All at once.

What struck me most is that this novel refuses to treat grief as something linear, something to conquer, or something that has an expiration date. Instead, it presents grief as an ongoing relationship. Not only with the person you’ve lost, but with the version of yourself that existed before they were gone. There is a quiet honesty in that idea. Healing isn’t portrayed as the absence of pain. It is the willingness to let joy, love, guilt, anger, longing, hope, and sorrow coexist without demanding that one erase the others.

The novel also explores the ways people mistake survival for healing. It asks how often we confuse functioning for coping, silence for acceptance, and strength for emotional resilience. There are characters who keep moving, keep showing up, keep taking care of everyone around them, while carrying wounds that remain largely invisible. The book never condemns them for that, but it gently questions what those kinds of survival strategies ultimately cost.

What I appreciated most is that grief is never treated as an obstacle to overcome so the romance can begin. The love story and the grief story are inseparable because they grow from the same shared history. Love doesn’t exist in opposition to loss here. It exists alongside it. Sometimes they even look remarkably similar. Both ask us to be vulnerable. Both require us to live with uncertainty. Both leave us changed. Even the explicit scenes felt less like “spice” and more like emotional overflow, another place where grief and desire blur together rather than compete.

Another theme that resonated with me is memory. This book understands that remembering someone isn’t limited to photographs or anniversaries. People continue to shape our lives through habits, inside jokes, expectations, dreams we once shared, and the choices we make because they loved us. Memory becomes something active rather than nostalgic. It isn’t about preserving the past so much as allowing it to remain part of the present.

Kat Marowe writes with remarkable emotional restraint. Rather than manufacturing emotion through dramatic twists, she trusts small moments, quiet conversations, and internal reflections to carry the greatest weight. Those moments accumulated until I realized I wasn’t crying because the story was sad. I was crying because it understood something true. It didn’t give the reader growth that was expected and easy, because that can be so far from real. She let these boys be complicated, and stubborn to a fault, and it made them that much more relatable to me.

To Ghosts & Gravity is ultimately about what remains after unimaginable loss. Not just the grief, but the love that refuses to disappear with it. It is a reminder that healing isn’t becoming who you were before. It’s learning to build a life that makes room for every piece of who you’ve become, regardless of how absolutely messy the journey is.