Review: 'Our Sister's Keeper' by Jasmine Holmes
Pub. Date: 09/06/2026
Publisher: Bindery Books
Mississippi, 1927. The groanings are coming.
No town is perfect, but East Cobb comes close. It’s a wealthy all-Black Free Town—untouched by white oppression—where ambitious Thea Elliot and her husband plan to make good on their big dreams. Little do they know that the idyllic town teems with ghoulish, walking nightmares . . . that only the women can see.
Marah knows the groanings well. She is one of the carriers—women with the ability to pull traumatic memories from men. Populated by men entirely freed of their pain, East Cobb has flourished, even as the remnants of their memories haunt the town’s women. When an unexpected death drives Marah to discover more about her own power, Thea’s and Marah’s worlds collide. The sisters must confront the rotten core at the heart of East Cobb’s prosperity and choose what—and who—will survive the reckoning.
A gripping blend of historical fiction and Southern gothic psychological horror, Our Sister’s Keeper is a fierce exploration of Black sisterhood, rage, and resistance.
In her 1979 essay 'Sexism: An American Disease in Blackface', Audre Lorde asks 'why are Black women supposed to absorb that male rage in silence?' (p. 61, you can read it here). She continues, 'Black men's feelings of cancellation, their grievances, and their fear of vulnerability must be talked about, but not by Black women when it is at the expense of our own "curious rage"' (p. 61). The feminist movement has famously struggled, and still is struggling, to become truly intersectional and this is, in part, what Audre Lorde addressed. The other issue she highlighted, however, is that Black women were also carrying the burden of their fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons' experiences. The struggle for freedom and equality was not just fought by Black people generally in America, but also by Black women within their own families and households. This is something I knew, having read Audre Lorde and other Black authors, but Our Sister's Keeper brought this to life in a way that was horrifying and somehow also beautiful. I will admit that I struggled a little, being a white, middle-class European woman, to figure out how to feel about the book. Or perhaps not how to feel, but how fully I could take on its message. Is it really my place to comment on the relationship between Black women and men? I don't know, but I am edging towards probably not. However, I do think it is my responsibility to know about the experiences of other women, to make room for these experiences and resulting feelings within feminist discourse, and to not look away from harm being inflicted. For this, Our Sister's Keeper is a very important book.
It is 1927, and Thea is moving to East Cobb with her husband. This is a town of free Black people, without oppression, a place where Black people can thrive. Except it becomes clear pretty quickly that the town expects Thea to put down her own ambition and be the perfect wife so that her husband can excel. We also get to see Marah's story, one of the "carriers" who keeps East Cobb so idyllic. She carries the memories of slavery, hurt, abuse, and racism for the men of East Cobb so that they can be free, even if it will kill her soon. It becomes clear that the Eden of East Cobb is built on the suffering of Black women, a suffering that manifests in the groanings that haunt the town. As the storylines of Thea and Marah come together, Our Sister's Keeper asks difficult questions about what we can sacrifice in the pursuit of freedom and happiness, whose suffering we are willing to accept, and whether it is ever morally acceptable to look away. The novel switches back and forth mostly between Thea and Marah, but there are also chapters dedicated to the lives of the other Black female characters. This not only makes for an interesting reading experiences but also allows Jasmine Holmes to depict the variety of Black female lived experience, the hopes and dreams they have, the challenges and complications, the perseverance and courage, but also the human pettiness and jealousy. While the novel absolutely celebrates the power of female rage, it does not paint Black women as perfect victims or innocent lambs led to slaughter. Instead, the novel tries to tell a complex story.
This is Jasmine Holmes fiction debut and I'm honestly blown away by it. She is a historian who has previously published on the topics that Our Sister's Keeper also works with. For a fiction debut, I think this novel is very tightly paced and thought-through. Holmes' historical knowledge absolutely shines through in the backstories she gives her characters, the settings, etc. but this never prevents her from also diving into the genre side of the book, specifically the Gothic horror elements. I imagine finding that balance was difficult, but it read very smoothly for me. I was also intrigued by how the stories of Thea and Marah are connected but start off in quite different places. Thea appears to walk into a Stepford Wives set-up, which is determined to grind the independence out of her, while Marah is stuck in a southern Gothic nightmare of pain and trauma. While this may feel discordant at first, I think these different approaches actually work quite well towards underlining the novel's main points: we don't all experience the world in the same way, your perfect life may be built on the suffering of others, you don't know what goes on when you look away. There are important messages in Our Sister's Keeper, but it is also an immensely readable and gripping book, without the one having to distract from the other. I would whole-heartedly recommend this to any and all readers, just go in prepared for depictions of violence and racism.
I give this novel...
5 Universes!
Our Sister's Keeper blew my expectations out of the water. I was expecting an interesting book but what I got was a visceral reading experience that educated me, shocked me, and inspired me all in one go.
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