Jo Kozak and her tight-knit group of friends, Caroline, Finch, Amrita, and Saz, are bound by more than just their passion for art. Their connection is a lifeline, a source of inspiration so powerful that when it begins to wane, it drives them to the brink of desperation.

The author brilliantly portrays the fragile balance between creation and destruction as these young women resort to the occult in a misguided attempt to reignite their creative flames.

This novel is a must-read for fans of psychological thrillers and dark fiction. It offers a fresh and chilling perspective on the intersection of art and the occult.

The publisher provided ARC via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

How far would you go to achieve success? Would you be willing to make sacrifices to reach your goals? Voice Like a Hyacinth by Mallory Pearson drives into this question through Jo and her roommates—Saz, Amrita, Carole—and their friend Finch. They're all in their final year at Rotham, a place where only one art student will get the chance to "Solo" and have their work showcased in galleries. If they don’t get that spot, all their hard work over the past four years might not pay off. Rotham is isolated in the middle of nowhere Indiana, so there’s nothing to distract them except their art.

Pearson’s book is captivating and, yes, spellbinding (pun intended!). She really brings her characters to life with all their quirks and flaws. Jo, the main character, can be pretty irksome at times, especially since she seems to see herself only through the lens of her friends, whom she labels as "my women". On the flip side, Amrita and Finch felt the most genuine and down-to-earth, standing out in contrast to Jo and Caroline. I also wished Saz had more page time—she felt like the most elusive of the group, though she’s still important.

Pearson makes you feel their anxiety, their dread, their deepest darkest fears and insecurities. She makes you want to feel this hunger for success and she brings them it all to life with her vivid imagery and prose: "This room would become an extension of me until the work the two of us produced could transmogrify into something worthy of standing on its own."

Pearson mixes realism with her magical, gothic style, and it really shows through the characters' experiences and the changes they go through. There’s a poignant reflection on how friendships evolve and sometimes drift apart, despite promises to stay connected. Jo's belief that they’d always be friends gets challenged as people grow and change: “We made a pact not to lose ourselves. We promised to find each other in any future. Friends drift apart, my dad liked to remind me. Plans change, and people move on.” It's a reminder that sometimes, despite our best intentions, relationships can grow apart as we change. Overall, this was a highly enjoyable read and I will definitely be reading more of Mallory Pearson in the near future. Mallory - you truly possess a gift of transforming visual art into prose. Oh how I'd wish I could visit a gallery with art so beautifully, detailed and described within this story.

A shoutout to the publisher, 47 North, the author Mallory Pearson, and NetGalley for a copy of this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC!

Sapphic dark academia, my love language. Five best friends in a highly competitive art program that decide to play with magic in order to bolster their chances at success. A recipe for heartache.

And heartache, Mallory does deliver. While I had some issues with pacing here and there, the writing was a thing of true beauty. The prose, the plot, the grief, the love; everything was felt so viscerally. I'm so grateful I got to read this and will be thinking of it for a LONG time!

Oh, these young women hurt my heart so much!

They’re ravenous for everything – for success, for love, for belonging, for revenge, and just to feel.

This is The Craft meets Dark Academia meets a Sapphic coming of age and it’s kind of everything.

This gets dark and eerie and is simply filled with such yearning that it becomes a gut punch of a read.

Excellent.

• ARC via Publisher

It was an emotional and Greta story telling.
Combined very great things and made the characters unique.

ARC provided by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.


One of my favorite reads of the year by far. I loved the beautiful writing, the incredible attention to detail when describing many of the art pieces, the found family aspect and the subtle horror/thriller elements sprinkled throughout. Overall would recommend this book to any “Art” person & contemporary thriller reader.

4 stars! this book delivered dark academia in a cutthroat art school, and it also had a group of friends who alternated between wanting to kill each other and kill for each other.

in other words, it was an incredibly gripping and fascinating read. i loved the gothic atmosphere and the exploration of art was such an interesting form of characterization. while i do think the main character was somehow blander than all of her friends, i also feel like that's meant to be one of the main facets of her personality.

however, even as someone who avoids horror movies like the plague, i wanted more horror elements throughout the novel. while there were some moments that were horrifying (and the writing was excellent at portraying them), i was expecting more. the ending, especially, was a little underwhelming, and i honestly just wanted to see the situation between the characters spiral even further.

still, i adored this book and would easily recommend it!

(thank you to netgalley and the publishers for the arc!)

A tight-knit group of friends in art school compete for a solo exhibition at the end of their senior year and turn to a dark ritual to improve their work.

I don’t typically read many horror books, but I was drawn to the description about queer friendship, found family, and folklore and a Sappho/Charli xcx epigraph was designed specifically for me! I was expecting more occult elements but the horror leaned psychological and atmospheric.

The real horror for me was how this somehow unearthed so many feelings from my toxic college experience. The codependent friend group, competitiveness, if these are supposed to be the best years of your life are you squandering it being lowkey miserable or is it all downhill from here, your friendships won’t be the same once you graduate, your college bubble and the stress of academia are the only thing that matters and the success of your senior thesis will define you, needing to get out but also being terrified for what’s next and how to be your own person.

SO I can’t say reading this was an entirely enjoyable experience but it did evoke a very specific feeling. Jo didn’t feel fully developed or memorable as an individual character but it feels intentional because she mostly defines herself in the context of the friend group, and the descriptions of their interactions were so painstaking and visceral. Some of my favorite scenes were the visit to the Art Institute/critiques because the way the author writes about art is beautiful!!

For fans of: We Ride Upon Sticks, Foxfire (1996), THAT scene in Chlorine, and ofc The Craft (1996)

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC!

Five sapphic art students are bffs4ever. They also all want to be the one chosen for the prestigious solo exhibition at the end of their senior year. All are struggling creatively, and they decide to try a dark magic ritual to boost their creativity while also punishing one of their creepy professors. This can't possibly go wrong!

At first I thought this was a little overwritten and had a hard time with the pretension of art and academia, but around the halfway point I became rabid for this book, the descriptions of the artwork, the relationship being torn apart, the growing dread. Is there any room for love and friendship in a competition? The real horror in life is what we do to ourselves and our loved ones.

I feel like a central theme of this book (besides the pressures of academia) was toxic friendship. Because of that, I was a little disappointed by the climactic scene. I wanted more of the friendships to be twisted when it was really just the one, and I felt cheated by that somehow. I also very much wanted Jo to learn how to be a complete person on her own but it doesn't seem like she's capable of that.

Dark academia enthusiasts rejoice: you will love the occult vibes, hyper-competitive artistic environment, and lush writing of this upcoming release.

It follows a group of five young women attending an art school who perform a frightening ritual in order to give themselves a competitive edge in their school’s senior-year competition. The character relationships and importance of chosen family are really great, and I absolutely couldn’t put it down once I picked it up; it had a perfect mix of daily detail and Big Plot Events, a really good pace, and a compelling plot.

There’s a not-insignificant amount of critique of academia as a structure built into the story, but I do wish that some of that critique had been taken just a little further in the book, to really ground it fully in what I think of as the genre (rather than the aesthetic) of dark academia.

This is a Jan 2025 release ... but I’d definitely look out for it then!

We follow Jo, and her best friends, who are all art students. Jo is our protagonist - we learn the story from her perspective.

These women inspire each other, stick together and go extra lengths for their art.
They even follow an occult ritual and this is when things start to go bizarre.
I absolutely adored the art crosses cult setting.

Plot, characterisation, twist 3/5
Prose 3/5
Mood 3/5
Horror mood 2/5
Gore (the effective use of it) 3.5/5


The themes of art (the making of art and the descriptions of art pieces) 4.5/5

DNF. The pacing of this book isn’t particularly slow, and it’s well written. However, for some reason it just doesn’t pique my appetite. It may have to do with the amount of description, and what it borrows from The Secret History and other dark academia books. I don’t think it’s bad per se, but I kept dreading reopening it again.

When I say I’m in the mood for a thriller/horror story, THIS is what I mean. It was like Bunny meets The Secret History meets Ninth House, in the all the best ways. The writing was engaging, the characters were interesting, the horror was indeed horrifying. I was seriously hooked from the opening chapter.

Ok, but on a side note, maybe the real horror story is the competitive nature of being a woman even at the cost of our mental health and friendships..spooky! Hahaha just a thought.

Anyway, if you’re reading this, this is your sign to get this book!!

I read this book via netgalley.

This wasn't quite perfect, but I liked it so much I can't bring myself to give it four stars.

My main complaint was the lack of characterization. Somehow, the protagonist and her love interest had far less personality than the three side characters that made up the rest of their group. Jo felt a little more realistic, since we see things from her viewpoint at least, but Finch was so bland I couldn't tell you a single thing that distinguished her from every other random character or made her attractive to Jo.

The other big problem was the pacing and the level of horror. Other than the occasional bits of intense gore, things felt quite tame and not all that spooky. Somehow, with the book blurb and the foreshadowing within the book, I was expecting a more intense climax with a more devastating outcome. I was left with a bit of a "that's it?" feeling that was fairly underwhelming. It would've been nice to see Pearson really dive into the interpersonal relationships of the group, ramp up the insanity more and more, and show how everything completely fell apart due to the ritual.

However, none of these issues kept me from deeply adoring Voice Like a Hyacinth. While it was a so-so horror book, it was a truly fantastic art book. Pearson is absolutely brilliant at writing about art and the process of making art. While we might not know Finch's hair color or favorite family member, we know all about her approach to painting, and that's a very fun way to explore a story. The author's love of art and experience with art shine through every sentence, and it makes for a very unique and enjoyable read. Everything felt so authentic to my experiences as a painter and art student that I wasn't surprised at all to learn the author was also an artist. She does an excellent job of drawing you in and making you deeply care about the artwork. About a quarter of this book was just descriptions of various paintings yet it never felt boring or repetitive. Everything was so beautifully and thoughtfully written that it was a blast to read.

A group of art students take dark academia to the next level by summoning someone, or something, they definitely didn't anticipate.
If you've seen the movie The Craft, this gives that exact same feeling. It will haunt you long after finishing, an instant cult classic.

Thank you to Netgalley for the ARC!

I am obsessed with this book. It may be one of my top five of the year. It had a combination of so many things that I love, art school, which described in such loving (and accurate detail!), hauntings, friendship, found family. The writing was breathtaking and visceral and really grounded. I loved it.

Voice Like a Hyacinth was a book about obsession, ritual. I wasn’t sure I would like this book as it’s not my typical genre, but I was pleasantly surprised and found it enjoyable yet very chilling. It was a good

Voice Like a Hyacinth is a dark academia story about rituals gone wrong, the ruthless art world, and the price of success.

Jo and her friends, Caroline, Finch, Amrita, and Saz have a coven type friend group as students at a prestigious art school. When they each have the chance to compete for a solo art show, the lengths they will go to protect and sacrifice themselves for a shot at fame turn occult and deadly. A sketchy professor becomes their target after one of the friends suggests using black magic to unleash their creativity and access artistic talents that would otherwise lay dormant. When the ritual backfires, the girls will learn just how fragile, ruthless, and sinister the price of art truly is.

Voice Like a Hyacinth is a combination of The Craft and the The Secret History, perfect for fans of witchy fiction and dark academia. The writing had a mystical quality with the descriptive prose and inner dialogue of Jo having a bit of black humour to balance the dark themes. The writing did remind me of Mona Awad's style, with its devilish creeping writing style. I enjoyed the plot which explored the power of friendship, loyalty, and sacrifice with a fiercely competitive and toxic academic culture serving as the backdrop. The occult aspects were macabre and its consequences for the girls, making up the flesh and soul of this story. I liked that each of the characters had a strong individual identity and role in the story with their friendship giving coven vibes, with their undying loyalty and obsessions with each other.

Voice Like a Hyacinth is a witchy and wild story that offers many warnings about the power of creative female energy.

In this spooky sapphic novel we follow five students during their final year at an art college, on their path toward the ultimate goal of displaying their art in a solo performance that will open doors to a successful painting career.

The writing is atmospheric with a hint of dark academia and the characters nuanced with complex relationships. I enjoyed my time with this book but felt that the story at times was overwritten and the pacing a bit inconsistent.

This read perfectly fit my mood and I am curious to further explore Mallory Pearsons works in the future.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC.

The characters....oh my god....these characters were so complex, layered, and incredibly well written that I could find pieces of them inside myself. The writing of the story made me feel like I was immersed. I loved this book so much and NEED to read more by this author!