Editor’s Note: This is a special guest review from my mom. Sandra is a retired high school English teacher with a lot of opinions and a newfound love of YA literature and urban fantasy—she’s a longtime fan of horror, campy mysteries and police procedurals. As a kid, her goal was to grow up to be Nancy Drew, so much so that she carried around a notebook to report on her neighbors’ potential criminal activities. We’re hoping that she’ll start every review like this one—with an f-bomb.

Evisceration is so fucking cool!

Kit and Fancy, the Cordelle sisters, take you through a portal into another world that’s bizarre and fascinating.

It’s a world where evisceration’s cool, where a crowd of gorgeous people born to carry their heads in their hands have star status, where imps pass from one person to another through kisses and buried bodies grow into trees sprouting the fruit of their inhumanity.

Portero, Kit and Fancy’s hometown, is a place unlike, yet like, those we know.

The Mortmaines, who wear only green as a uniform, keep the town safe from monsters who might swallow the town whole. Portero, the abode of the strange and fabulous, grows docile trees unlike anything growing in the wild, has redbrick streets and low colorful buildings holding secrets that live there breeding and boiling under the surface crippling the minds and actions of its people. Portero, a place where nonetheless love and kindness still flourishes.

If you’ve not had parents, not experienced the uncertainty of adolescence, not felt the sting of prejudgement nor disapproval of others, then Slice of Cherry’s not one that you would relate to.

For the rest of us, it’s a trip down a rabbit hole of madness and hope.

Descendents of their father, the infamous Bonesaw Killer, and their mother, the kind and wise Madda, the sisters take the mantle of their father following a dark desire to kill, but unlike their father to kill only those deserving of death. Indulging in their birthright leads to the discovery of a portal that opens into a fine world, The Happy Place. It gives them the perfect ground to leave the slain. How can there be crime if there’s no evidence?

Woven into their Mad Hatter’s world comes depth of understanding, self discovery and love. Step into the land of Portero and The Happy Place.