Our Sister’s Keeper

Earlier this month, Jasmine Holmes released her debut novel, Our Sister’s Keeper. Set in the all-Black town of East Cobb, Mississippi in the 1920s, it follows two women who live in this seemingly utopian city. Thea has just moved there with her husband, Kid, but immediately feels like she won’t fit in. Thea wants a career, not to become a housewife like all the other women in town. She’s also disturbed to learn about the “carriers” unique to the city: young women who take on the emotional burdens of men… literally. Marah is one such woman, but she fears she can’t handle any additional suffering. Two of her fellow carriers have already died recently, and she might be next unless she can find a way to get out of this role.

What I Liked:

• Intersection of racism and patriarchy. I always appreciate when horror calls out real-world atrocities, such as racial subjugation. Here, that intersection between racial oppression and sexist oppression is deftly but defiantly on display. The women of East Cobb are expected to take on the men’s burdens in order to lift them up. These Black men have faced enough racism; they want to “feel like men,” without that racism overshadowing their manhood. But this is at the direct expense of the Black women there. How can a progressive-minded feminist like Thea fit into such an old-fashioned city? How can they all see it as a “paradise” when the women are still being subjugated?
• Peeks into the different carriers’ backgrounds. Clotilde houses several young women, working as “carriers,” but none can remember their own pasts prior to showing up there. What led each of them to work in such circumstances? Eventually, we get short chapters for each of them, learning how they all simply wanted more. That desire ultimately became the shackles that bound them to Clotilde.
• The twist! I was expecting one thing, and was surprised when something else was revealed instead. Sorry, everyone, that’s about all I can say about that! You’ll just have to read it and see what I mean.

What Didn’t Work for Me:

• Uneven handling of the narrative timeline. The way time passes in Our Sister’s Keeper wasn’t always consistent. Especially when a certain thing is revealed, I wish the setup felt more natural in regards to the passage of time.

Final Thoughts

Our Sister’s Keeper is a layered work of horror mixed with a bit of science fiction. It’s a stunning exploration of race and sexism, of our recent history of slavery and segregation, and of the speculative horrors of scientific experimentation based in something like eugenics. I found this novel to be absorbing and eye-opening as much as it was unsettling. I hope to read more from Jasmine Holmes in the future.

Special thanks to Bindery Books and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC of this book!

Get the Book

You can buy Our Sister’s Keeper here – it’s available as a paperback, ebook, and audiobook.

Our Sister’s Keeper by Jasmine Holmes
Audience	Adult
Genre	Horror
Setting	Mississippi
Number of Pages	336
Format I Read	Ebook (NetGalley ARC)
Original Publication Date	June 9, 2026
Publisher	Bindery Books

Official Summary

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.