The Insatiable Volt Sisters

By: Rachel Eve Moulton

Narrated by: Janet Metzger, Erin deWard, Chelsea Stephens, Nancy Peterson, Amanda Stribling

Length: 12 hrs and 4 mins

Publisher's summary

It’s the summer of 1989 and Beatrice and Henrietta Volt are coming of age on remote Fowler Island, their ancestral home and wild playground. Thicker than thieves, the sisters plot their futures, having no idea that their parents are separating. Or that the plan is to separate them.

Ten years pass before Henrie gets a desperate call from her sister―their father has died suddenly and B.B. needs her to come back to the island for the funeral. But Henrie doesn’t want to go back. She’s barely put the island and all those rumors about missing women behind her. And isn’t it odd that she remembers nothing at all about the night she left? And why is she suddenly filled with fear about the quarry pond behind the house?

Told from the perspectives of four flawed, fascinating women, The Insatiable Volt Sisters is a lush, enthralling fable about monsters real and imagined. From the unbounded imagination of Rachel Eve Moulton, the critically acclaimed author of Tinfoil Butterfly, comes another eerie, terrifying exploration of family and legacy: Will the Volt sisters inherit the horrors of their past or surpass them?

©2023 Rachel Eve Moulton (P)2023 Blackstone Publishing

Bit of a letdown.

I was really excited for this book. Downloaded the minute I got the email saying my preorder was available, and dove right in. Unfortunately, it's been rather difficult to keep with it.

I knew there would be time jumps, a writing style that I loathe, but thought it would be fine since it was expected. It was not fine. The jumps are constant, and the voices do not change. Nothing about 1989 (or any other year) felt different at all from the current timeline, and I had to keep rewinding to figure out what year a given chapter was supposed to take place.

The missing women. "No one cares" except the Volt sisters. But... they all leave behind something, and those things are collected in the town museum. So I guess people do care? Is the woman who runs it killing them and keeping trophies? With unreliable narrators all over the place, who knows.

I'm about 75% of the way through this book, and not sure I will finish it. Usually, there's at least one character in a multi-POV book that I can latch onto, and at least care about enough to get their part of the story. All of these characters are so similar, I don't even have that luxury. They're only half sisters, because their father married a woman who was exactly like his first wife. One of the sisters pretends she is the other in her own head, and the other wants nothing more than to be just like her sister... REALLY?! Why are there so many characters if they are going to specifically be all the same?! Oh, but one (don't ask me which) is a lesbian, for no reason other than checking a diversity box. Her sexuality plays no part in the story at all.

It feels like something interesting is going on at the periphery of the story, but it's not worth yawning through 75+% of a book to see if it ever goes anywhere.