Review: Ghost Flower by Jessica Conwell

Title: Ghost Flower

Author: Jessica Conwell

Publisher: Amazon/Kindle Unlimited

Length: 454 Pages

Category: Dark Fantasy, Sapphic Fantasy

Rating: 5 Stars

At a Glance: Jessica Conwell gives voice to a world and its characters filled with danger and wonder. And there is sorrow. So much sorrow. It is heartbreak given form and substance. I don’t want a sequel to Ghost Flower. I need a sequel to Ghost Flower.

Reviewed By: Lisa

Blurb: Come and see.

Elodie Morne lives two lives.

In one, she’s an eighteen-year-old high school student about to graduate, secretly in love with her best friend, Ezri, and unusual only by the standards of a banal world. In the other, she is the scion of the Outer Darkness, born of Cennend, the sentient nothingness from which all reality sprung. Determined to live as nothing more than an ordinary human, Elodie has done everything in her power to keep the two worlds apart.

But forces from both conspire against her. When she discovers a secret society of elites attempting to break the bonds that have kept her “parent” imprisoned for millennia, Elodie is forced to commit an unspeakable act to save all of creation from the wrath of the darkness that birthed her.

Now the consequences of her actions have ignited the dark heart of her town, turning the sleepy tourist community of Rook Lake into a war zone. Pursued by adversaries both mortal and immortal, Elodie and Ezri risk everything to save reality itself from being unmade. But their enemies are ruthless and desperate, and the coming battle may cost Elodie her ordinary life, her greatest love, and even her own humanity.

Review: This book. This glorious, gorgeous, gut-wrenching book. Ghost Flower is ethereal. It’s dark. It’s bleak. It’s sweet and charming. It’s a source of anguish and filled with magic, danger, betrayal and sacrifice. There is loneliness and friendship. There is falling in love and discovering family amongst the detritus of what was once someplace called civilized. Or, if not civilized, the town of Rook Lake certainly mimicked it. For a while.

And there is sorrow. So much sorrow. It is heartbreak given form and substance.

Jessica Conwell gives voice to a world and its characters filled with danger and wonder in which a force—an angry all-knowing, all-seeing primal being of immense power—is held captive in the deepest, darkest forest. Cennend wants. They covet. They crave power and loathe humanity. They wish to destroy and remake the world according to their own lusts and laws. They hold humans beyond contempt. But in the same breath say they love their daughter, Elodie, who lives as a human among humans and has learned to love these fragile, finite creatures. One human in particular.

Elodie and Ezri have been best friends for years, inseparable, devoted to each other in ways that evolve into something so much more than the simplest definition of love. There is nothing they wouldn’t do for each other, up to and including the most selfless of sacrifices. They suffer and they persist. They suffer because they persist.

I remain utterly mystified and perplexed by the way Jessica Conwell chose to end this book. I hope it means there is a planned sequel to Ghost Flower. I need a sequel. I need to know what happens to Elodie and her sibling Lyra, and to Ezri. I need to know more about what has awoken and where it will lead to next.

You can buy Ghost Flower here: