This is the perfect fall read, especially if you live somewhere where it's still hot. It takes place in a small town deep in the wooded mountains of West Virginia, and having spent a lot of my life in North Carolina and Virginia, the setting really came through in the writing. It was atmospheric and immersive, but authentic. If you've spent time in the South and roll your eyes at campy "Southern" dialogue, this will be a treat for you. If you, like me, though, have friends from the western US who think it's a typo when you try to tell them how excited you are about someone having hair "an improbable shade of red, like it's been poured directly out of a Cheerwine bottle", I offer myself as a support system.

Linden James is one of four sisters in a family where all the women are born with a unique special ability. Linden's is that she can taste other people's emotions. If abstract flowery descriptions in other books usually confuse you (like, how can his kiss taste of rainclouds and melancholy? what do you mean?) this might work for you, because YES Linden can assure you that sadness reminds her of buttermilk, and here's why.

Linden went missing in the woods a year ago and has no memories of what happened before she was found. She's tried to put this incident behind her, busying herself with shifts with her sisters at the family's diner, Harvest Moon, where she bakes unique and rustic-sounding desserts that made me unbelievably hungry. Unfortunately, Linden wasn't the first to go missing in the forest, but she was the only one to turn up alive, and legends of the Moth-Winged Man haunting the woods persist. When it happens again on the anniversary of her own disappearance, she feels driven to investigate.

Linden's sisters help her look into the town's mysterious history as well as their family's, and find that the two are more entwined than they realized. I loved the sisters' relationship; the scenes with all of them gave strong "performing a seance at a sleepover" vibes, which is something I didn't know I wanted in a book, but definitely recommend.

I wasn't super invested in the romance subplot of this, and I did predict a couple of the plotlines, so it wasn't an all-time favorite story, but I really loved the writing so much that I was thrilled to see there will be a book two! Things wrapped up nicely in this one, so I'm kind of hoping that the next book will be about one of the other sisters---I'd love a Rowan book!

Thank you to NetGalley, the publishers, and the author for an advance copy in exchange for my honest review.