House of Salt and Sorrows (2019)
House of Salt and Sorrows is a 2019 children's fiction book written by Erin A. Craig.
At Highmoor, a great house perched above the sea, twelve sisters have dwindled to eight. Four are dead, each loss stranger than the last, and the villages whisper that the gods have cursed the family. Annaleigh keeps watch as her remaining sisters slip out each night to dance until dawn at balls no one else can find, their slippers worn through by morning. Ghostly visions push her to ask whether grief has a source she can name. Erin A. Craig reworks the Twelve Dancing Princesses into salt-air gothic, all gossamer skirts and quiet rot.
Quick answers
What is House of Salt and Sorrows about?
At Highmoor, a great house perched above the sea, twelve sisters have dwindled to eight. Four are dead, each loss stranger than the last, and the villages whisper that the gods have cursed the family. Annaleigh keeps watch as her remaining sisters slip out each night to dance until dawn at balls no one else can find, their slippers worn through by morning. Ghostly visions push her to ask whether grief has a source she can name. Erin A. Craig reworks the Twelve Dancing Princesses into salt-air gothic, all gossamer skirts and quiet rot.
When was House of Salt and Sorrows published?
House of Salt and Sorrows was published in 2019.
Who made House of Salt and Sorrows?
House of Salt and Sorrows was written by Erin A. Craig.
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House of Salt and Sorrows in our writing
A few thoughts on House of Salt and Sorrows
Guillermo del Toro's Crimson Peak matches it almost exactly: a decaying manor, a bride, and secrets seeping through the walls. Pan's Labyrinth carries the same fairy-tale menace, and Black Swan supplies the dance-until-you-break undertow that runs beneath the shimmering slippers.
Gothic fairy tales that let the dread show through the beauty
Highmoor's crumbling grandeur and Annaleigh's dead sisters give House of Salt and Sorrows its gothic hush, the mood Guillermo del Toro builds in Pan's Labyrinth and Crimson Peak. Black Swan carries that transformation-as-cost idea onto a stage where perfection ruins a body and mind, while Once Upon a Broken Heart and A Court of Thorns and Roses let something uncanny live underneath a familiar fairy-tale romance.
Twelve Dancing Princesses energy, and other old tales gone strange
Erin A. Craig lets the Brothers Grimm's Twelve Dancing Princesses curdle into horror, and this group does the same work on other old tales. Holly Black's Cruel Prince trilogy and Tithe turn changeling folklore into court politics and betrayal, Caraval rebuilds a magic show out of fairy-tale rules nobody fully explains, and Serpent & Dove wraps a witch hunt inside a doomed fairy-tale romance.
Sisters bound by a family bargain none of them chose
Annaleigh's family carries a curse none of the sisters asked for, and this shelf returns to daughters untangling secrets their bloodline hid. Feyre's sisters Nesta and Elain are pulled into a Fae bargain that changes what they are, across A Court of Mist and Fury and A Court of Wings and Ruin, while Clary's hidden family history reshapes her world in City of Bones, City of Ashes, and Clockwork Angel.