Celia struggles with being alone. After losing her child, she finds herself going to community grief groups and selling leggings for an MLM. Trapped and tired of aching with loneliness, Celia remembers a friend from her grief group and how she longingly spoke of her home in Kindred Cove. Each year, Kindred Cove holds the Salt Festival. This celebration allows only a handful of vetted visitors onto the island and allows them to see bits and pieces of the secluded community there, living as they do. After all, the only export from Kindred Cove is a specialized salt that promises healing. Upon arriving on the island, Celia is stripped of her phone, her purse, and her shoes. She is given a small hut to live in with a buddy. Only, her buddy is an island native that seems far more distracted about what’s going on behind the festival than what is happening with Celia. Did Celia just see her friend from the grief group out of the corner of her eye? Afterall, while Celia deals with intense feelings of loss, on Kindred Cove nothing is ever truly lost. She is promised healing, but the Cove expects something in return.
From the very first pages of Sarah Gailey’s Make Me Better, the reader knows something is off. It may be the way the locals of Kindred Cove interact with outsiders. It may be the fact that the Cove was created from a horrifying disaster that turned it from a freshwater lake into a type of sea, complete with an ever-expanding reef stretching tendrils towards the mainland. The reader wants to relax on the promise of a healing journey for Celia, as so many do when they find themselves in a fringe religious group or cult. Gailey is a champion of creating an atmosphere that makes the reader uneasy, while also making you question whether you’re being a bit too judgmental.
Veteran narrator Xe Sands captures not only Celia’s desperation and loneliness, but also captures the poetic and unsettling nature of Sarah Gailey’s prose. The combination of Sand’s narration and Gailey’s writing is fantastic, as Sands seems to intrinsically understand Gailey’s pacing and the levels of performance needed to embrace each character and capture the nature of blind belief and desperation.
If you’re a fan of things like Midsommar or a good old fashioned cult documentary, Make Me Better is a familiar decent into madness.
