Review || Listen to Your Sister by Neena Viel

Published February 4, 2025 by St. Martin's Griffin

Twenty-five-year-old Calla Williams is struggling since becoming guardian to her brother, Jamie. Calla is overwhelmed and tired of being the one who makes sacrifices to keep the family together. Jamie, full of good-natured sixteen-year-old recklessness, is usually off fighting for what matters to him or getting into mischief, often at the same time. Dre, their brother, promised he would help raise Jamie–but now the ink is dry on the paperwork and in classic middle-child fashion, he’s off doing his own thing. And through it all, The Nightmare never stops haunting Calla: recurring images of her brothers dying that she is powerless to stop.

When Jamie’s actions at a protest spiral out of control, the siblings must go on the run. Taking refuge in a remote cabin that looks like it belongs on a slasher movie poster rather than an AirBNB, the siblings now face a new threat where their lives–and reality–hang in the balance. Their sister always warned them about her nightmares. They really should have listened.

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Listen to Your Sister caught me completely off guard. The cover and blurb hint at a haunted house story, maybe a slow-burn spookfest. That’s not what this book is doing. It’s sharper, stranger, and far more emotionally intense than that.

Calla Williams is holding her family together with white-knuckle perseverance. She’s stepped into the adult role by default, trying to parent two brothers who resent her for it, even as they rely on her completely. She’s haunted by nightmares of their deaths, and the pressure of those dreams colliding with real life begins to warp her reality in genuinely horrifying ways.

This book runs on raw emotion. Grief morphs into rage, rage into guilt, guilt into love, and the whole thing barrels forward like a broken roller coaster that never slows down enough for you to catch your breath. Reality and the supernatural blend so seamlessly that you’re never quite sure what’s happening in Calla’s mind and what’s happening in the world, which only deepens the unease.

The sibling dynamics are messy and authentic. Calla is exhausted, grieving, angry, guilty, and stubbornly refusing to let go. She loves her brothers fiercely with all her heart, but they only see it as suffocating. There's grief, rage, love, and guilt—all tightly interlaced. Viel turns that emotional knot into horror, not with cheap scares, but by forcing you to sit inside the mess with her characters. The fear comes from love curdling under stress, from responsibility turning into a trap, from knowing everyone is hurting and no one knows how to stop it.

If you’re not a fan of fever-dream-like books that prioritize emotion over straightforward truths, this might not be your book. But if you enjoy horror that creeps under your skin because it acknowledges how difficult family can be, obligation can be stifling, and that you sometimes can love people too much, Listen to Your Sister is unforgettable.