Happy SaturYAY !

I don't know about you but NJ has some beautiful beach weather today ! Im also in a kick tail kind of mood after concluding Cicadas Sing of Summer Graves . Interesting title, huh? I thought so too, and that was the original reason why I was so intrigued with this book.

This book is dark, deep, and will have you thinking about it long after concluding!

After finishing the last page, I couldn't believe that I had never heard of Quinn Connor before and had to do some research. Imagine my surprise when I found out this was a debut! My jaw was literally on the floor. What is even more mind boggling is that it's not ONE author but TWO! Quinn Connor is a pen name for two women who met in college and will easily become the hottest new authors to launch this year.

Check out this teaser :

At turns haunting and breathtaking, Cicadas Sing of Summer Graves explores legacies of love, family, and the ghostly imprint grief leaves behind as three women face the past to bring light to an old Southern town lost deep beneath the surface.

Years ago, yellow fever gripped the small lakeside town of Prosper, Arkansas. At the height of that summer swelter, in the wake of an unexpected storm, the dam failed and the valley flooded―drowning the town and everyone trapped inside.

The secrets of old Prosper drowned with them.

Now, decades later, when a mysterious locked box is pulled from the depths of the lake, three descendants of that long-ago tragedy are hurled into another feverish summer. Cassie: the reclusive sole witness to an impossible horror no one believes. Lark: a wide-eyed dreamer haunted by bizarre visions. June: caught between longing for a fresh start and bearing witness to the ghosts of the past. Bound together, all three must contend with their home's complex history―and with the ruins of the town lost far beneath the troubled water.

I was very intrigued by the premise of this book and wanted to like it, but in the end didn’t quite live up to my hopes. I loved the atmosphere and setting, but had a hard time connecting with the plot and characters.

Thank you NetGalley for the ARC.

There’s been a lot of hype about this book lately, but it fell a bit flat for me. The atmosphere and some scenes were solid, eerie and intriguing. Unfortunately, there were too many elements that just never coalesced into a cohesive whole for me.

For people looking for a perfect summer read that would have just the right blend of sticky heat, fiction based on true stories and thoroughly woven-in supernatural elements - this is it, search no further. With a slow and unassuming start, the story pulls you in without you noticing, and only lets to resurface for a breath after it’s over.

The book follows three girls on a single summer as their lives become interwoven with one anothers’, as well as the very special lake, in the center of it all. Cassie has lived a spit distance from the lake all her life, but she can’t even force herself to look at it now. Lark has returned to the lake of her summers, but it’s not a vacation this time. June is always on the move, and the sleepy town near the lake is just her next stop. Each one has her own secrets to carry, but so does the lake - and it’s no longer keeping quiet about them.

I wouldn’t want to give out too much about the book, but one thing is worth mentioning (or repeating, in this case) - it has supernatural elements. I am not sure how I missed that when reading the synopsis, but I was definitely surprised to figure that out on my own at around twenty five percent mark.

What I appreciated the most, and what is, in my very subjective opinion, the strongest part of the story, is the descriptions. I am a visual person and this text provided me with such vivid characterization and depictions of scenes and feelings and location, I felt like I could actually see it all unfolding in front of me. It also goes without saying (but I am going to say it) - the rich history and real life horror of putting infrastructure above peoples lives held me captive and interested in the story much more than I anticipated, making this book one that really has something for everyone to enjoy.

I received an advance review copy from Netgalley, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

Yellow fever spreaded far and fast in the small town of Prosper, Arkansas and many were still struggling to get back to normal. The sweltering summer brought on a huge storm that flooded the damn and the valley and not only killed but trapped the people of the town. Decades later a small locked box is discovered at the bottom of a lake, which is now the top of the town, and with it a ghost story of secrets are revealed.

This book was a bit slow for me and uneven to get into. It’s told from three different girls point of views, we learn all about the mysteries and struggles Prosper went through. I really loved the setting and historic view the book paints.

The book has a summer gothic feel to it and definitely a creepy undertone.

Cicadas Sing of Summer Graves is a moving, beautifully written story of a small lakeside community grappling with living amongst the tragic history of the displaced town that came before. The characters all have deep connections to the town and to each other, as they discover gifts and skills that may seem to be a curse but will actually lead to their salvations. The magical realism, vividly gorgeous imagery and an ominous mysterious tale kept me reading, as I couldn't put the book down. The ending gave hope for the characters and the town's future. I absolutely loved it and will look forward to reading more from this author!

I really find that I love horror and supernatural thrillers that are set in coastal or lakeside towns. There is something about the water... the dark, unknown depths, never knowing what could be lurking there. Pair that with a town with a really tragic history, where even years and years later, the shadows of the past hang on for dear life, mucking things up... oh, it is like catnip to me!

While I had first attempted reading this as a DRC and found in that format, that I simply could not get into it, I decided that perhaps a different format would do the trick... Sure enough, it did and I absolutely loved this book!

Told to us by three different women, this is the story of the town of Prosper, Arkansas, a lakeside town riddled with decay, but rich in history. Cassie, Lark and June, three women with roots deep within the town have to face the horrors brought on by the lake itself.

Decades ago, the town fell victim to Yellow Fever sweeping through, among other things in the height of that fateful summer. A storm came in and rushed the dam, causing the town to flood, drowning everyone. The jolts of that tragedy can still be felt by these three women, individually plagued by haunting visions, devastating urges, or crippling fear, and they learn that they will be fundamental in the events happening to the town now. Something evil is approaching and its locking the people of Prosper in its grasp.

This is a story of history, pain and grief, but is also somehow uplifting in it's severity. You watch as people come together in moments of need, friendships and romances blossom and hopefully, goodness and love win.

This book was way different than I thought it would be. It has magical realism, horror, family, grief, and so many secrets! It is told from multiple pov's which a tad confusing at the beginning until I learned who was who. I enjoyed this book and I am looking forward to more books by this author! I received an advanced readers copy and all opinions are my own.

This was a definite slow read that tbh never picked up for me ...
I loved the idea of this book but imo felt there was wayyyy too much going on & way too many pov's .
Maybe because there was 2 authors things just got jumbled?? 🤷

I appreciate the Arc #netgalley even though it wasn't my cup of tea .

This book was eerie and dark but also magical and fantastic! Slow, melancholic, bug also nail-bitingly spooky - true southern gothic fiction!
Cicadas Sing of Summer Graves tells the story of a swelteringly oppressive hot summer by a lake in Arkansas when secrets begin to come up to the surface - there used to be a town there, until Yellow Fever hit it in the 1930's, additionally it got flooded when a dam failed, drowning everything and everyone in its wake. There are three main characters - three POVs there’s Cassie running the local antique shop with treasures from the lake, she has lived by the lake her whole life but will not go close to it. There’s Lark who used to spend every summer there with family, she is back to clean up a mess her father left behind without drowning in it herself and there is June who lost yet another job in the city and is coming to Prosper because her aunt is the town minister - now they are all connected by old legends, ghosts and a mysterious wooden box.
This book explores themes of family, grief and love - protecting memories and dwelling in the past or never getting too attached while describing a hauntingly beautiful lakeside summer setting right around the Fourth Of July.
Thank you so much NetGalley and Sourcebooks Landmark for the eARC!

Dark, twisting, suspenseful - CICADAS SING OF SUMMER GRAVES had everything I wanted in a summer read and more. Connor deftly moves through alternating POVs, peeling back the mysterious history of Prosper layer by layer, with a finale that does not disappoint.

This books just FEELS like summertime! Taking place in the sleepy little lakeside town of Prosper, Arkansas, this man made lake is filled with secrets down to its very bottom.

Told from the view point of three different girls who's lives come together one fateful summer. This book started a little slowly, but the descriptive language drew me in, making me feel like I was right there at the lake.

A slow, melodic tale of mystery, history and a little bit of magic this one is a must read this summer!

EXCERPT: 'You ever been to a place without hope? A place just so out of luck that there's no saving it?'
The beer label shredded, caking under her fingernails. She wiped hurriedly at her jeans. 'I don't know. Yes.'
'It became a place like that. Old Prosper, right before they made the lake. It's hard to love a town on borrowed time. Even the dead had to be rehoused after the dam - all those graves flooded,' he replied. 'Funny, isn't it, that we built a new graveyard for the dead and didn't build a new town for the living?'

ABOUT 'CICADAS SING OF SUMMER GRAVES': Years ago, yellow fever gripped the small lakeside town of Prosper, Arkansas. At the height of that summer swelter, in the wake of an unexpected storm, the dam failed and the valley flooded—drowning the town and everyone trapped inside.

The secrets of old Prosper drowned with them.

Now, decades later, when a mysterious locked box is pulled from the depths of the lake, three descendants of that long-ago tragedy are hurled into another feverish summer. Cassie: the reclusive sole witness to an impossible horror no one believes. Lark: a wide-eyed dreamer haunted by bizarre visions. June: caught between longing for a fresh start and bearing witness to the ghosts of the past. Bound together, all three must contend with their home’s complex history—and with the ruins of the town lost far beneath the troubled water.

MY THOUGHTS: The author's note at the beginning of this book shares that 'The town of Prosper was inspired by Buckville, Arkansas, which was flooded in the 1950s by the Blakely Mountain Dam and is now beneath Lake Ouachita. . . . . . The dam resulted in the mass dislocation of Garland County residents, mainly struggling white farmers but also many who were Black and Native American, from their homes. We wanted to wrestle with submerged histories, memory lost and found, and the impact of "progress" on communities and land.'

That is some goal! While I'm not entirely sure that the authors completely achieved their goal, they have penned an interesting and intriguing story.

Cicadas Sing of Summer Graves is a book I fell in love with in the first few pages. The writing was stunning and atmospheric. I fell in love with Cassie, her quirky living arrangements, and her fear of becoming a child again. Cassie had been branded as strange and fragile, a freak child who cried and screamed and threw tantrums like no one's business. She had 'night terrors that glistened blue and tasted like mud in her throat.' Although she, as an adult, no longer throws tantrums, she is somewhat of a loner and is still occasionally prone to those night terrors. She ever forgotten her childhood friend Catfish, who appeared one day when she was swimming, and was later involved in the biggest trauma of Cassie's life. Catfish also plays an important role in this story.

Our other two main characters, Lark and June, have equally intriguing backgrounds.

Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, I fell out of love with Cicadas Sing of Summer Graves. I still enjoyed it, but didn't love it anymore.

The writing is superb, descriptive and atmospheric, the characters intriguing; so what went wrong? In the end, I think it was simply too much. There were too many storylines, too much going on - for example, was the Rig/Woody/Bolt/Sammy storyline necessary? I didn't think so. It detracted from the main storyline rather than adding to it.

Cicadas Sing of Summer Graves is a debut novel by this duo of authors. They are obviously excellent writers. I just believe that they need to focus more on what is integral to the story in order to produce a great read. Definitely a duo to watch.

⭐⭐⭐.5

#CicadasSingOfSummerGraves #NetGalley

I: @quinn.connor.writes @bookmarked

T: #QuinnConnorWrites @Sourcebooks

#contemporaryfiction #familydrama #fantasy #friendship #lgbt #paranormal #romance #smalltownfiction

THE AUTHOR: Quinn Connor is one pen in two hands: Robyn Barrow and Alexandra Cronin. An Arkansan and a Texan, when they aren’t writing, they’re arguing about the differences between queso and cheese dip. Both writers from young ages, Robyn and Alexandra met in college and together developed their unique co-writing voice.

DISCLOSURE: Thank you to Sourcebooks Landmark via Netgalley for providing a digital ARC of Cicadas Sing of Summer Graves by Quinn Connor for review. All opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own personal opinions.

“Not every old hurt could be healed. People, like water, had a way of flowing imperfectly on.”

Cicadas Sing of Summer Graves is a Southern gothic horror with magical realism and a bit of WLW romance! And the author is actually two authors, Quinn Connor is made up of Alex Cronin and Robyn Barrow.

This book had a very slow start and I contemplated DNFing a couple of times. Took a little too long to get going so could’ve been cut shorter I guess, but I was propelled by the concept and mystery of the town. The middle picked up more to where I felt more motivated to read it and didn’t want to put it down after the 60% mark!

I appreciated the foreword from the authors about the inspiration to write this book, telling the history of the creation of some US lakes (like Lake Lanier) created by flooding towns and killing, or displacing, its residents-creating generational trauma and a form of gentrification.

The novel is told in third person, focusing on our three FMCs June, Lark, Cassie, (and sometimes Bolt). The chapters were longer than I liked but that’s a personal preference. The second half was better than the first half which is why I bumped it to 4 stars, it just took a little too long to get to the “guts” of the story.

This book had a fantastic ending that ties things up but also leaves it a little open for the character’s futures! Overall a really beautiful, heartbreaking story that makes me want to know more about the true histories behind the novel. I also want to include the following two quotes from the foreword to highlight the authors’ efforts in writing this book:

“We wanted to wrestle with submerged histories, memory lost and found, and the impact of ‘progress’ on communities and land. Through this novel, we seek to honor and sensitively engage with these complicated histories so deeply entrenched in the places we come from.”

“Too often, the dispossessed were not duly compensated for what they were forced to leave behind. With deepest respect, we acknowledge these wrongs. This book is set in a fraught land and addresses violence, complex intergenerational pain, and particularly class-based trauma.”

TW/CW: body horror, death, self harm, blood, violence, toxic friendship, racism, classism, grief

Rep: Two of the MCs are biracial and WLW

*IG review will be posted on pub day

Cicadas Sing of Summer Graves is a book that is as beautifully written as the title makes it sound. This southern gothic is a haunting story of love, loss, grief for three beautiful main characters: Cassie, Lark, and June. They're all somehow connected to Prosper, Arkansas and the secrets held beneath the Lake.

Quinn Connor's descriptive writing made me reread sentences just to admire how beautifully written they were. I cannot stress enough how vivid Quinn's writing is. I felt like I was at Prosper Lake being haunted with the secrets the lake dredged up. (It also helped that I read this in the heat of my early summer, so I was lucky enough to experience it in 4-D.) I think the plot was a little slow at first, and at times I thought that was the pace of the book, but this slow burn was worth the wait. It's hard to describe the plot because of how complex it was. It wasn't done poorly, just a little too complex to explain without explaining the entire book (at least for me). Themes of the supernatural/magical realism, multiple POVS, and LGBT+ representation made this book all the more enjoyable. I was shocked at how nicely woven it was between all three POVs; it's something I don't see too often in novels this complex.

Thank you NetGalley, Sourcebooks Landmark, and Quinn Connor for the free ARC in exchange for my review!

This is one of those books that has a lot of potential but really needed to focus or narrow down what it was trying to do. I liked parts of it, particularly Cassie's story, which was the most interesting and really held the bulk of the story. The different povs were difficult to tell apart at the beginning of the book and needed to be more distinct. Later in the book, it felt like there was too much going on for the story to properly focus and go into depth for each plot line. A large amount of the book felt like filler and repetitive or unnecessary to the overarching story. I think that this book could benefit from more editing and a focus on what story the authors really wanted to tell and which povs would achieve this.

I wanted to like this one but it was hard. The story moves at an incredibly slow place and I found it difficult to decipher which character’s POV I was reading from. I think the story had potential but it just fell short for me. Thanks to the publisher for my review copy. Cicadas Sing of Summer Graves is available now.

✨this book was fine. i wished i liked it more than i did, but i felt nothing towards the characters and the plot while reading this. i lovedddd the atmosphere, the setting, which is why i was initially drawn to this story… but alas, this wasn’t the one for me!

✨i know that there is an audience for this story though. what the plot was trying to talk about is valid, i just can’t get over the feeling that something was missing.

✨i would recommend to people who enjoyed where the crawdads sing (though not the best itself, the southern setting surrounded by nature and mystery is what i’m getting at here).

Cicadas Sing of Summer Graves is a slow creep into Southern gothic horror. It's the best part of Stephen King horrors, where something isn't quite right in a small town but you're not quite sure what until little by little the terrors and the mourning and the despair settle over you. But in the depth of terrible things, there are moments of wonder, and little childhood mysteries to be explored.

For less than 400 pages, you'd think there would be too much going on in this book but everything is tight enough, and comes together well enough. It's atmospheric in a way you can nearly feel the humidity on your skin, or smell the scent of flowers in hair or honeycomb or the acrid smoke of fireworks. Rich descriptors put you as a reader right there.

As a reader I appreciated the forward about the inspirations for Prosper and its generational history, the threat of gentrification and even a sort of colonialism. It took me a bit of time to get into the story, but I think upon reflection that was more to do with me, myself, and I rather than the book itself. I was a bit confused by the quick switches in POVs within chapters, even with a break marker, but again that's probably a personal preference/habit thing. When I got into it, I really got into it, both worried and needing to know what happened to each of the main characters.

Thank you to NetGalley and to Sourcebooks Landmark and to Quinn Connor for the borrow approval in exchange for this honest review.

This was a lovely and incredibly written read. The POV alternates between Cassie, Lark, and June- three women whose lives intertwine in the town of Prosper. A flood once swept through the town and left behind a lake, which becomes the main backdrop. It's a haunting story tied together with grief, love, mystery, and magical realism.

The prose is poetic and beautiful, and the worldbuilding is beyond what I could've asked for. Every face and moment is thoroughly described and detailed, really dragging you into the nostalgia of the past summers near the lake. I really loved to see the queer relationship between the characters as well, especially given the location in a small town in Arkansas.
The story did start off slow and it was a lot to take in at first. The variance of the three points of view was hard to follow, but once you understand the characters and their backgrounds it became a lot easier to differentiate between them. I almost want less of the unnecessary details to have more of the overall mystery. There are a lot of descriptions but a small chunk of the real depth of the story. Overall it was an enjoyable read and had surprising elements that I wasn't expecting at first. I would recommend for anyone that likes magical realism and mystery with LGBTQ+ characters, this will be what you're looking for!
Thanks to NetGalley and the author for allowing me to review!