The Cherished us the perfect creepy/spooky vibe book to read that perfectly fills the void I've been chasing since finishing The Hazelwood and the inheritance plot line gives me the inheritance games vibe. This book is all the things I love in one package. I did not see the big twist coming and really shook me up - the creepy vibes kept me up reading all night.

I love a good YA horror thrilller and this was spooky and kept me hooked the whole way through! Fascinating and unique storyline and characters!

Jo is a teen living with her very pregnant mother and her stepfather. She doesn't see eye-to-eye with them or their social circles, so when a letter arrives, informing her that her grandmother has died and bequeathed her home and land to her, she sees a way to freedom: even if she has to wait until she's of legal age for it. Her mother insists she must sell the home - despite Jo's grandmother's very firm assertions that she must never sell - and heads to the home, with Jo, to clean it up and prep for sale. Once there, she meets the tenants of her grandmother's land: a gruff male househand and a childlike teenage girl. As Jo's mother becomes sicker and sicker, Jo spends more time wandering the home and learns more about her father and the delusions that plagued him for his entire life... and she learns some truths that may be too incredible to believe, but are very real and very much a threat. Ward's pacing is excellent, building the suspense to allow readers time to grasp the book tighter as they progress, waiting for answers. An excellent gothic horror novel for teens that enjoy dark fantasy.

I highly enjoyed this. The premise isn't something new, but the way it was written made it fresh and exciting. Definitely give it a try.

3.5/4 Stars. I tried reading this one again and really got pulled into this paranormal young adult novel. I loved the writing style, and the plot was so interesting to me. However, I did find the ending a bit rushed. Thank you for the early copy!

Oof. I don’t even know if I could find the words to rate this one. I previously wasn’t going to rate it but man. Ableist, racially insensitive, and overall offensive at times.

Love a good gothic horror novel featuring a haunted estate. This book wasn’t a huge standout to me, but I thoroughly enjoyed myself while reading.

I honestly couldn’t get through this book. The internal monologue was boring and off putting. The sentences were choppy, or run on. I also didn’t enjoy how much exposition there was. There were fat phobic comments, and comments about mental health that were totally inappropriate, and concerning especially for a YA novel. The racial comments about being “dark skinned”, or possibly Arab, were tasteless. Whereas white people being described as “classy”? Just an unappealing read.

The vibes of THE CHERISHED are very, very good -- it's spooky and hypnotizing and creepy, like wandering through an abandoned garden. I will always be a sucker for 'girl inherits a weird house' plotlines, and I was not disappointed. There's something so incredibly alluring about a weird little town with weird people and weird customs and absolutely no recognition of its own weirdness. The reveal in the last act of the novel was more sinister than I'd expected, and the climactic fight went a lot harder than I thought it would -- certainly not a bad thing! I do think this novel would've been better served with a slight genre shift into New Adult rather than Young Adult -- the logistics of a teen becoming the permanent caretaker of this home requires a lot of suspension of disbelief, and Jo could've used NA's sense of 'I know who I am, but how do I get to be it?' rather than YA's guiding question of 'who am I?' Having her feel a bit more sure of herself but unsure how to make that self fit with her mother and stepfather's expectations more concretely would've made the answer of the house feel more satisfying (and less burdensome).

The Cherished starts where Josephine, the main character receives a letter in the mail telling her, her grandmother has passed and she left the house to Josephine.

Jo is unhappy with her life with her mom and stepdad. They actually want her to sell the house against her wishes.

Jo wants to keep the house because it’s where her late father grew up and she was close to her grandmother.

The house ends up being peculiar and Jo wonders if the stories her dad told her wasn’t just him going crazy…

I usually don’t give books low ratings, but this was a tough read. The book is very slow and bounces around a lot

Okay, so here's the thing. I haven't wanted to write this review because writing negative reviews is hard for me. But I think this one needs to be written. I loved the idea behind this. The description had me genuinely excited to read the book. But I didn't get further than chapter 4. Part of it is genuinely the writing style. The style is a bit stilted, and there are some stylistic choices that make the narrative very hard to follow.

The big problem is the straight-up offensive language used in this book about race, mental health, and fatness. Like, what in the world. The disrespect and disregard shown for people not like the author was infuriating. I won't be recommending this book to anyone and will likely actively encourage people not to read it. Congrats on the very-rare-from-me 1-star rating.

This book had me very confounded. I really don't understand what the author was going for, YA horror? The cover seems to imply that, but I feel that the cover, albeit beautiful, is misleading to the tone of the story. I didn't think this book was good, but not horrible either, just very confusing in tone. The subject matter was fairly dark, but written lightly, especially the ending. The first half felt very jumbled and clunky, but it does improved during the second half. The majority of the book just seemed to be the MC complaining about her mother's marriage to her step dad, instead of the actual plot about fairies.

I really wanted to like this book, but it just wasn't for me. As some other reviews have described, there are a quite a few racial, fatphobic, and generally problematic sections towards the beginning of the book which made it very difficult for me to get into the story. I also found some of it to be a bit repetitive. I see how the author was likely trying to make certain characters unlikeable but it didn't work for me. I've chosen not to finish it at about 1/3 of the way through.

Unfortunately, I cannot give a great review of this book because I found it to be too filled with underlying racist themes, racist comments, fat phobic comments, homophobic comments, and terrible descriptions and slurs for mental illness. I love a good YA Horror book, but even adult horror doesn't bring this level of evil phobia to the page.

Thank you to NetGalley and HarperCollins Children's Books for the e-Arc.

i could not finish this book. the scenes were so graphic i had to put it down and i couldn’t pick it back up. i tried multiple times to read it because i love horror and i can usually handle a lot but this was too much for me.

Typically I give a book 100 pages before I DNF... I didn't even make it that far with this one. I couldn't find a single thing to like about it

What started off as what should’ve been a interesting premise turned into a long chore of a read. Most of the books is filled with unlikeable characters with fat phobic and harmful mental health dialogue. The story doesn’t begin to pickup until the 75% mark and at that point I was left wishing the story had ended 50 pages ago.

I thought this was pretty good. I am not big into the whole horror genre but this one had me hooked. I liked the characters and the writing was easy to follow. Plus I flew through this book. I love when that happens. This book would be perfect to read during the spooky season.

The Cherished is the story of Jo whose life is upended when her paternal grandmother dies and leaves her a house. Jo's mother, anxious to sell, takes Jo to the house where they meet the odd caretaker Tom and a mysterious ward of the house, Hattie.

The Cherished is problematic at best. The way this book talks about mental health, fat people, and POC is quite unsettling. Additionally, Jo is super annoying. She hates her mother because she's pregnant? I don't understand. Also, I don't think I've ever come across another character (or person even) who says "ew" as much as Jo. We get it. Everything is ew. If that weren't enough to put you off this book the pace is excruciatingly slow.

While I think that this book had a good premise, it was very poorly executed. Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for this ARC. However, I did not enjoy this book.

As a fan of creepy novels, there was a lot I loved about this novel once I got into it. The house was well described and set the scene well for sinister occurrences and enjoyed the premise and the midpoint where things began to slot into place and the tension increased. For me fae are best when they're the dark versions linked to folklore which these were.
But I struggled with how some characters including Enzo Jo's father were described. In some respects, I could see the author was trying to show how different Jo was from the rest of her family and probably her maternal grandparents were racist, but there could have been better language to use. If it had continued throughout the book rather than just at the beginning, I'd have stopped reading.