The Unraveling of Cassidy Holmes

by Elissa R. Sloan

Publisher: William Morrow
Ginasbookreport Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Genre: Literature
Read This If You Love: Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Malibu Rising

 

“It struck me as odd that someone who could claim knowledge of a god could hate someone so forcefully.”

Cassidy Holmes struck it big as a member of the 90s girl group Gloss. Fifteen years later, she has committed suicide and her former band mates are left analyzing their past and all the steps that lead Cassidy down a dark road. Cassidy, through her own voice and version of the past, also steps through what it was like for her to want, need, achieve, be adored, but always feel alone. 

While many will want to compare The Unraveling of Cassidy Holmes to Daisy Jones and the Six, I actually felt like it was more reminiscent of Reid’s Malibu Rising. There have been a run of oral histories of fictional bands. Unraveling is a narrative with time jumps and different points of view. While it covers a similar theme as those other books, it flows in a different way…more like a peeled back diary of four young women finding fame, life, and oneself. I loved The Unraveling of Cassidy Holmes and the writing is so poignant and heart-wrenching. It’s a bare bones look at what fame can do to different psyches. I found Sloan to be a wordsmith with such passages as…

“Can the fake persona eat your real self, mimic so many of your truths that her falsehoods become your reality?”

The author just nailed the voices of each character and has a total knack for ending each chapter with a cliffhanger to get you speeding to the next page. When an author leaves you with a quote that you write down to always remember (like the one that opens this blog post), you know that you have connected to text that speaks to you. I have NO idea why this book didn’t get more hype when it came out. It’s far better than books that hang around on list after list after list (and, yes, you probably know exactly the books I mean!).