The Hollow Girl by Hillary Monahan: A Review

The Hollow Girl by Hillary Monahan

My Rating: 5 glowing stars!

Publisher: Random House Children’s

Publish Date: October 10th

Received: Netgalley provided an e-arc in exchange for an honest review

Purchase: Amazon

Synopsis:

Five boys attacked her.

Now they must repay her with their blood and flesh.

Bethan is the apprentice to a green healer named Drina in a clan of Welsh Romanies. Her life is happy and ordered and modest, as required by Roma custom, except for one thing: Silas, the son of the chieftain, has been secretly harassing her.

One night, Silas and his friends brutally assault Bethan and a half-Roma friend, Martyn. As empty and hopeless as she feels from the attack, she asks Drina to bring Martyn back from death’s door. “There is always a price for this kind of magic,” Drina warns. The way to save him is gruesome. Bethan must collect grisly pieces to fuel the spell: an ear, some hair, an eye, a nose, and fingers.

She gives the boys who assaulted her a chance to come forward and apologize. And when they don’t, she knows exactly where to collect her ingredients to save Martyn.

*Trigger Warning for Rape*

Musings:

A magical novel written with pure love, The Hollow Girl has officially become one of my new favorite books of the year! This novel reads so purely and I loved every single second of it.

One thing that made me so happy to see what the Author’s note in the beginning explaining why Hillary decided to write this book and what it meant to her and also, giving her own trigger warning explaining that rape does have a part in this novel and that she wouldn’t want to doing that on anyone (which to me meant so much because it has felt like a very long time since the ya has been fighting for trigger warnings in books and to have an author take it upon herself to provide that was a wonderful sight to see.

What I also loved about The Hollow Girl was the diversity and how beautifully the descriptions of Romani culture were written. I felt like while I was reading I learned so much about a culture that I had very little ideas about and what it means to be Romani.

What I loved most however, was the magic. The way that it was a mixture of dark and light and how it changed Bethan as a person as she began to learn the craft from her Grandmother. The magic is bloody at times, but it always gives off a feeling of spirituality and I loved reading about it.

Then there is this underlying romance that blooms in this novel between Bethan and Martyn that made my heart sing! Especially at the beginning of the novel when they were first getting to know each other and some of the proprieties of Romani culture I started to really fall in love with them together. It felt so nice to see such a pure romance come together in such a beautiful way in the beginning of the novel despite all the cultural struggles.

The Hollow Girl is a book that will inspire magic in people’s hearts as well as the belief in something more in the universe. Beautifully written, this book is dripping in cultural Enchantment.

Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed my review! Let me know what you think of The Hollow Girl.

-Till next time!