I don’t know exactly what I was expecting this book to be, but it was far different than I had anticipated. I found it to be long and, at times, confusing. I don’t want to spoil the story for anyone, but the tale of what the “cousins” are within the creature world is not explained to my satisfaction. The author leaves a great deal up to interpretation, and without background knowledge, this leaves the reader confused and frustrated.

Overall, 3 stars because the premise is good, but I didn’t enjoy this book as much as I wanted to.

I found this book pretty disappointing. It had a heavy, gothic feel, which I definitely enjoyed, especially against the backdrop of Hawaii. That being said, this not only moved painfully slowly, but the secrets, when they came, where just lackluster and flat. It doesn't help that you could figure out the "cousins" pretty easily, so nothing's really a surprise. The first 60% of this book is a snoozefest, though, and I had a hard time picking it up to keep reading.

I also felt like the characters were really one dimensional, except Sunami. I liked her--I liked that she was a character who was capable of changing after our first impression of her. The rest just seemed kind of flat and predictable.

I forged through until the end, but I don't know why. I suppose I kept waiting for it to become more evocative and interesting. It just never did.

Slow in the beginning but picked up and loved every suspenseful second ! Was a little hard to get through the first part because if a book doesn’t catch my attention right away I tend to fade off into something else but pushed through it and found it to be an enjoyable novel after all !

Really like this book very suspenseful; kept me up late reading. Setting added a lot of interest, Characters were realistic and multifaceted. Great story!

A fab and creepy read that kept me gripped from the first chapter. Strong characters and a excellent storyline.

Sara is an adopted child who is only allowed out of the house to attend school, and rarely at that. After having recovered from a mysterious illness she is still given doses of a strange medicine that her mother didn't get from a doctor. After her recovery she is somehow changed, and animals including her once beloved dog seem to hate her. When 4 children arrive to spend a month in her home, Sara is told they are her cousins even though her parents have never spoken to her about any relatives in the past. The children are unnaturally pale and are never to be fed. They burn easily in sunlight and are to subsist only on "medicine." Jenny, the daughter of one of the school teachers, forms an uneasy alliance with the school bully Sunami to try to help Sara and find out what is really going on in her house.
This YA horror was a bit longer than it needed to be and because of that the story dragged at times. Much of the dialogue was phonetically spelled and used odd word choices to reflect that English was not the first language of several characters and this did not work in favor of the book, but the story itself was quite creative and the cousins were creepy.
3 and a half stars rounded up to 4 out of 5

The Curse of Sara Douroux is definitely a case of a book being better in theory than in execution. While I can appreciate what C. A. Wittman was trying to do, the story just got away from her. There were too many ideas forced to fit into one story, and there wasn’t enough space for all of them.

Wittman did do an excellent job of setting the scene for her story, and the use of region specific language really brought her characters to life. Her descriptions of the various locations made it possible to really see where everything was taking place. Her attempt at creating a new version of a traditional “monster” is also admirable, if poorly executed. She seemingly had too many ideas she wanted to incorporate, and the result is confusing and jumbled. I just finished the book, and honestly have no idea what happened at the end, or in several scenes from the book. Unfortunately, this is not one I would recommend.