Anybody who has read Sarah Gailey knows she crafts unflinching narratives. Make Me Better is the third novel I’ve read by Gailey and it is something to experience. Set I n Kindred Cove, a location separated by the world at large, Gailey introduces readers to Celia. Who is Celia? She’s a woman looking to become better, to heal herself. When she learns of a wellness retreat set on an island in the middle of a salt lake, she does everything she can to join and feel better.
An exclusive invitation.
A remote island infamous for its miraculous ecology.
A once-in-a-lifetime chance to fix everything that’s broken.
But sometimes growth requires sacrifice….
WELCOME TO KINDRED COVE.
Celia is so tired of being alone. All she wants is to have a family―to belong to someone. That’s why she’s going to Kindred Cove for the annual Salt Festival held by the secluded community that lives there. They promise that healing is possible. They promise that transformation is inevitable. There is no grief at Kindred Cove, because there is no suffering. Nothing is ever lost.
Celia knows that, at that mysterious island surrounded by that impossible, ever-growing reef — she will find herself.
She’s ready to be healed. She’s ready to be transformed.
She’s ready to believe.
Celia is desperate to become a mother; she’s had several miscarriages. Celia has no real family (her parents are deceased when we meet her), no connection except for her job. She views this as a failing and that becoming a mother, having a baby will solve her problems and be a cure-all. When she meets Adelaide at a self-help group, she learns of this place Kindred Cove, which is somewhat famous for the pure salt it sells to the “mainland” and the annual “Salt Festival,” the only time outsiders are allowed into the community to learn and internalize their teachings to heal themselves.
When Celia arrives on the island, her assumptions and identity become refashioned. Nobody wears shoes on the island, people start to connect with her, particularly the character named Easy. Easy is one of the more prominent women on Kindred Cove but she makes a quick connection to Celia. Much of the story is a breaking down of who Celia is, with Easy pushing deeper and deeper for Celia to be honest not with just Easy, but with herself. Celia is, for lack of a better word, an easy mark. She is desperate not only to become a mother, but to belong, to be accepted, and to have a real purpose.
Then there’s Kindred Cove itself, an island and isolated community having very little contact with the outside world. Horror stories often focus on isolated communities, those places that shun influence and as much connection to the outside world as possible. Gailey has given readers a fascinating place in Kindred Cove and it has a fairly dark history. She doesn’t reveal all of it, but enough to know that the location if maybe not haunted, might possibly have some kind of influence on the people who inhabit it.
The whole story has a lulling, subtle sense of unease. There’s no real in your face horror in the novel, rather Gailey elegantly makes things seem normal or just a minor thing to reframe your thinking. But that subtlety grows, it builds until the smiling and glad-handing shuffle to the left or the right to reveal something unpleasant underneath.
Much of how the society of Kindred Cove functions is questioned by Celia. As a result, some couple of the long-time residents aren’t happy with her or her deepening connection to Easy. Gailey bounces between timelines and characters to paint a larger picture of what Kindred Cove is and how some of the characters came to be in their lives in this…, okay, I’ll finally say it, cult.
The way the citizens of Kindred Cove normalize everything about their way of life and how Celia becomes more drawn into it, and especially how she began to truly see things felt very much like George Orwell’s 1984 if on a smaller scale of an island rather than the world. Specifically, I felt a resonance between the character journey Celia experienced in Make Me Better and what Winston Smith experienced in 1984. In my mind, 1984 is one of the most terrifying novels I’ve ever read because it is so extremely convincing. Gailey pulls that off here… the ease at which the citizens of Kindred Cove live their lives and share their understanding with “visitors” was very convincing as well.
Make Me Better is an enthralling novel that continues to show Gailey’s deft hand at dark stories that expose the core of raw, human vulnerability and the horrific possibilities if those emotions are exploited.
Recommended.
© 2026 Rob H. Bedford
Hardcover | Tor Books
May 2026 | 432 Pages
https://sarahgailey.com/
Excerpt: https://reactormag.com/excerpts-make-me-better-by-sarah-gailey/
Review copy courtesy of the publisher
