Queer Books

Hollow Review

Book: Hollow
Author: Taylor Grothe
Publisher: Peachtree Teen
Year: 2025
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Synopsis : “After a meltdown in her school cafeteria prompts an unwanted autism diagnosis, Cassie Davis moves back to her hometown in upstate New York, where her mom hopes the familiarity will allow Cassie to feel normal again. Cassie’s never truly felt normal anywhere, but she does crave the ease she used to have with her old friends.
Problem is that her friends aren’t so eager to welcome her back into the fold. They extend an olive branch by inviting her on their backpacking trip to Hollow Ridge, in the upper reaches of the Adirondacks. But when a fight breaks out their first night, Cassie wakes to a barren campsite – her friends all gone.
With sever weather approaching and nearing sensory overload, Cassie is saved by a boy named Kaleb, who whisks her away to a compound of artists and outcasts he calls the Roost. As Kaleb tends to her injuries, Cassie begins to feel – for the first time in her life – that she can truly be herself. But as the days pass, strange happenings around the Roost make Cassie question her instincts. Noises in the trees grow louder, begging the question : Are the dangers in the forest, on the trail, or in the Roost itself?
In a world where autistic characters rarely get to be the hero of their own stories, Cassie Davis’ one-step-back, two-steps-forward journey to unmasking makes Hollow as much a love letter to neurodiversity as it is a haunting tale you’ll want to read with the lights on.”

Review : This is a strange review for me; I spent the majority of my time reading Hollow absolutely certain this would be a 5-star-review kind of book. It was impeccably written, impossible to put down, and left me with so many questions bouncing around in my mind – waiting, waiting, waiting for the big reveal that would tie things up and explain the nuances and mystery of the book. Sadly, within the last quarter of Hollow, the plot completely fell apart, the twists and turns Grothe had to take in order to explain the strangeness became overly complex, and left me with so few answers I am almost totally baffled as to why and how it ended the way it did. The sharp turn toward confusion is something I’ve been mulling over for two days since reaching the ending and I’m having a hard time coming to terms with this as a purposeful choice and not a mistake in storytelling.

It’s worth saying that Hollow is genuinely so well written for the majority of the story, it’s a dark and winding suspense-filled mystery of a book filled with nuance and palpable anxiety as we experience Cassie’s world both externally as her camping trip goes horribly awry, and internally as we bounce back and forth between flash backs to a bullying incident at her last school and her present internal world as she navigates a new autism diagnosis. Hollow as a whole is a beautiful metaphor for the neurodivergent experience of masking, or putting on a face for each set of specific circumstances one might find themselves in during a day-to-day existence. Cassie returns to her hometown after living in the city with her family, following a mental breakdown that lead to an autism and trichotillomania diagnosis. She’s lost touch with her friends and upon returning, in an effort to rekindle their friendship, she’s invited on their annual backpacking trip into the Adirondack Mountains. Everything seems fine, at least on the surface, until the first night of their trip leads to too much to drink, blacking out, and waking to find half of her friends have left the group behind. With an imminent storm approaching, Cassie leaves the campsite behind to find and rescue her friends before something terrible happens. It’s during her initial panic as she searches for the rest of her group that Cassie stumbles, spraining her ankle, and finds herself being rescued by a strange boy she’s never seen before – Kaleb. This is where things begin to take a strange turn.

Kaleb and his mother Stasha live in a remote part of the mountains in a small, off grid community called the Roost. It’s here that Cassie is allowed the space to rest and recover while the storm rages around them, taking a break from searching for her friends until the storm passes and they can get radio signal to the rangers down the mountain. Within the Roost are several families, most of whom have stumbled across the community and have chosen to stay, each living in a small home that seems to have been built by Kaleb’s parents. While staying at the Roost, Cassie discovers that there’s a secret language everyone speaks, some strange mixture of different dialects and languages from across the globe. The members of the Roost seem pleasant, though there’s never quite a sense of ease, as they continue to speak in a foreign language Cassie is unable to get a grasp of, and the books are all written in some unknown tongue she’s equally unfamiliar with. Kaleb continuously tells Cassie how unfair it is that her friends have left her on the mountain to fend for herself and says repeatedly that they’ll have to pay for what they’ve done, which gives a nice sinister backdrop for the scene Grothe has created. While in the Roost, Cassie begins to notice that there are carved wooden dolls…everywhere. They seem to surround the Roost, filling buildings with their haunting, carved faces, peering down from rafters, and generally giving an air of strangeness to the entire community. There are so many instances like this where Grothe is clearly making a point about neurodivergence, the way humans interact with a known dialect and jargon that doesn’t always reach the people who might stand on the fringes or feel as though they can never quite get a foothold in with those who so easily adapt. There’s a profound message of accessibility and acceptance within this storyline, but there’s also a lot left to be desired when it comes to unfolding the story outward into an ending that makes sense.

*Spoilers Ahead* As the book begins to really unravel at the end, so much comes to light about the Roost and the community of people who live there – really driving the point home that Cassie has simply never felt as though she belong, that in wearing a mask she’s as wooden as the dolls who surround the compound. The masks neurodivergent people are often forced to wear are ill fitting and a source of tremendous discomfort and I think Grothe does so well in addressing this concept with simultaneously creating a super creepy drama through which it might unfold. It’s how things come apart at the end that really left me struggling for answers; as Cassie finally starts to put the pieces of the Roost’s strangeness together, she realizes (too late) that Kaleb is actually her good childhood friend, Blake. Yet, in all the time she’s spent at the Roost – and this is another issue I find with the actual storytelling of the book, as the time she’s spent there seems to range from a week to several months with zero explanation beyond perhaps some kind of magic?? – she never once recognizes Kaleb as Blake, literally one of the friends on her camping trip. And not only that, somehow Kaleb / Blake is supposed to have created the entire Roost on his own, carved all the members of the community, and also kidnapped several hikers? Over the course of how long? The time frame, the inexplicable inability to recognize even Blake’s voice or mannerisms or scent (which she mentions multiple times), and the complete lack of explanation for all of the above lead the ending of the book to ultimately fall to pieces on top of a well written few hundred pages. I think there’s a singular moment early on where Cassie mentions briefly that she’s been diagnosed with face blindness, which I think might explain being unable to recognize Blake as Kaleb on it’s most base level, but it’s never mentioned again and without working a little harder to tie things together, it feels loose and confusing at best.

The unknown language spoken in the Roost and the unfamiliar written language in the books are never really explained, and while I can appreciate that the spoken language serves as an analogy for how Cassie feels disconnected from neuro-normative folks, the written language being something totally foreign to her feels like an aspect of the book that was written initially and then forgotten about when it came time to wrap things up. The ending of the book is unclear, deeply confusing, and left me with more questions than answers, which is an unsatisfying way to end a suspenseful, magical novel. I really do appreciate the parallels Grothe draws between those who stand on the fringes of the world and Cassie’s experience at the Roost, I love that Cassie was written to give neurodivergent individuals a place to be the hero, but I don’t know that it was completely successful when everything was all said and done. Cassie spends a lot of time back-and-forthing between staying in the Roost and leaving, even when her friends are dying around her, so much so that it felt as though the point was being made, mistakenly, over and over and over again. It felt like Grothe was hammering it home a little too hard, and in doing so neglected wrapping up crucial elements of the plot. I wanted to give this book 5 stars so badly! I wanted the ending to be better than it was, to make more sense than it did, and to give more of a feeling of completion than I was left with. Sadly, the ending spoiled most the book for me and I had to go with 3 stars. I think there’s room to figure things out and make it make more sense, but I also think it’s not super likely to happen at this stage and I’m sad for that and for Cassie’s story.

Advice : I think this book had a lot of potential – if you like crows, if you like something vaguely sinister, if you want to see a neurodivergent person be the hero, wow! You’ll definitely have something to dive into with Hollow. However, I want to recommend that you don’t get your hopes up for the puzzle pieces to fit together at the end – they don’t. This one might be best checked out from your local library first.

We Could Be Rats Review

Book: We Could Be Rats
Author: Emily Austin
Publisher: Atria Books
Year: 2025
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Synopsis : “Sigrid hates working at the Dollar Pal. Having always resisted the idea of “growing up” and the trappings of adulthood, she did not graduate high school, preferring to roam the streets of her small town with her best friend, Greta, the only person in the world who ever understood her. Sigrid was never close with her older sister, Margit, who is baffled and frustrated by Sigrid’s inability to conform to the expectations of polite society.
Sigrid’s detachment veils a deeper turmoil and sensitivity. She’s haunted by the pains of her past, from pretending her parents were swamp monsters when they shook the floorboards with their violent arguments to losing Greta’s friendship amid the opioid epidemic ravaging their town. As Margit sets out to understand Sigrid and the secrets she has hidden, both sisters, in their own time and way, discover that reigniting their shared childhood imagination is the only way forward.
What unfolds is an unforgettable story of two sisters fingering their way back to each other, and a celebration of that transcendent, unshakeable bond.”

Review : Before I dive into We Could Be Rats (WCBR), I would be remiss not to discuss some content warnings. Something I appreciated a great deal about Austin is that she included a singular content warning at the start of the book, a small blurb letting the reader know that suicide would be discussed. But, we can’t simply leave it at that. WCBR does not merely bring up the mention of suicide, it is an entire book about suicide; likewise, it more than mentions domestic violence – within varying familial structures. There are both discussions of and visceral scenes depicting traumatic triggers, discussions of opioid addiction, mental health struggles beyond the aforementioned suicide, sexual assault, and threats of public violence.

WCBR is not merely a stunning work of fiction by Austin, it is at times a funhouse of mirrors, frequently nostalgic, and wildly relatable all in one turn. Not content to simply give us a story, Austin has crafted a well-timed mind fuck of a novel (I think you’ll pardon my language after you read this instant hit). Told in thirds, Austin challenges the reader to steep themselves deeply within a broth of empathy through many, so, so many suicide note attempts through Sigrid’s lens, read as though through the eyes of her older sister, Margit. We spend the majority of WCBR weaving through thinly veiled confessions, dodging twists and turns thrown into the mix with the deft hand of a creative writing genius – I don’t use that term lightly. There were moments, moments I won’t even begin to describe for fear of giving too much away (perhaps to tempt you further to adding this one to your list of books this year), where I found myself skeptical of Austin’s writing, unsure of how her writing fit with the narrative I was being told to believe – enough so that I considered giving this book a 4 out of 5 stars. But then…well. Things changed.

The remaining two thirds of the book are told from the perspective of Margit and Sigrid, respectively. As the story unfolds in the most miraculously unpredictable and loping manner, we bare the honor of witnessing just how alike the two sisters are, despite a lifetime of misunderstanding, growth in opposite directions, and their shared trauma. Without realizing how intertwined their lives have been, Margit and Sigrid find their feet falling into step before they can even recognize what’s happening. Margit, the classic older sister, the protectress and truly the only adult-like figure in Sigrid’s life, finds comfort in caring for others in her own way – perhaps to the detriment of those she aims to care for. Sigrid, on the other hand, finds herself adrift, floating through life like a bird in a sea of monkeys, despite dreams and desires, taking a backseat to the hopelessness and despair of life in a deeply conservative small town struggling with an opioid crisis.

Austin weaves a palpable sensation of otherness into WCBR, I found myself slipping off the human realm of Paige the reader, sidling into Sigrid’s imaginative mindscape with ease. Sigrid feels deeply relatable to me, though I’m not sure this will be universally felt, as a twenty-year-old with no plan or idea for the future. Sigrid writes at times about not knowing yet who she is, of sliding into versions of the self that others wear, trying each on to see what fits best, slipping into the skin of those who know themselves and in doing so attempting to discover who she might be as well. At its core, WCBR is a story about the threads of family trauma that burrow into the lives of those whose lives are intimately touched by it, the threads that tie us to each other, and the ways in which we exist in the world as part of a whole because of, or in spite of them.

Austin asks us to move through the tangible grief within WCBR to see the beacons of light she’s offered in the sacred space of shared humanity. She doesn’t tug at us to touch these spaces, rather, as she gently guides us through we find that we cannot help but brush against them. The light seeps through no matter how hard we try to ignore it. And in doing so, we may just find our own shared connections with Sigrid and Margit – a tiny parcel of humanity of our own.

Advice : I wish you well on your journey into We Could Be Rats. I say so confidently because I feel so strongly that you should read this book. It’s beautiful, it flows well and reads quickly, and it’s an important story whose aspects will likely reach each reader in completely different ways. Add this one to your list.