THE PORCELAIN SISTERS by Daryl Gregory – Review

I received this book for free from the Publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

The Porcelain Sisters by Daryl Gregory
Published by Tachyon Publications on October 27 2026
Genres: Adult
Pages: 208
Format: eARC
Source: Publisher
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The nitty-gritty: Dark secrets abound in The Porcelain Sisters, a laugh-out-loud funny and heartfelt story about two sisters trying to uncover their weird family history.

Daryl Gregory is one of my favorite authors, and I firmly believe more people should be reading his books. His latest is a novella revolving around two sisters, but the hook here is that one of the sisters is dead and her ghost/essence is trapped inside a porcelain doll. It’s such a fantastic concept, and Gregory does a bang-up job developing his story around this set up. The author’s trademark humor is in full force, and the characters are quirky and unforgettable.

Ruth has had it with her sister Isabel. In their mid-twenties, the twins live together but only because they have to. Ruth takes care of Isabel, who is trapped inside a doll and has been ever since the girls were babies—and she’s not happy about it at all. Ruth’s only respite from her combative sister is a wooden box that prevents Isabel from moving around (she can move on her own as long as no one is watching!), but Ruth also loves her sister, so she feels guilty whenever she locks her inside.

One evening, after Isabel scares away Ruth’s date, Ruth takes a swipe at Isabel out of pure frustration and the doll falls off a ledge and cracks open. Ruth is horrified and vows to fix her, and so begins an adventure that will take them to Marseilles, France, the home of their deceased mother Anne Neveaux, to find the person responsible for putting Isabel into a doll and convince them to fix her.

The Porcelain Sisters is a fun, madcap tale with fantastic characters. The story involves not only a possessed doll, but a clan of witches calling themselves le Clan des Sorcières, a magical crow and cat whose familiars are human, and a dollmaker with an evil agenda. Ruth and Isabel become entangled with these characters and are thrust into danger the minute they land in France. There is a lot of family history that the sisters don’t know about, so it was fun getting the answers right alongside them. Isabel isn’t the only doll in the story, and one of the funniest scenes in the book is when she’s thrown into a room with a bunch of other dolls (who only speak French, of course).

As for the characters, Ruth and Isabel as a team are ridiculously funny, and their dialog was so well done. Isabel wants nothing more than to “grow up” and be a regular sized woman, but because of complications with the magic that put her in the doll in the first place, she can’t. So instead she takes her anger out on Ruth, which involves constantly dropping F-bombs and insults. At first Isabel’s grating personality annoyed me, but by the end of the story I had completely fallen for her bad ass/female rage-filled character.

For those who have read Gregory’s other books, in particular Harrison Squared and We Are All Completely Fine, be on the lookout for Easter eggs from both books, which was a lot of fun. Ruth is actually friends with Harrison, and his name crops up in the conversation several times. Ruth and Isabel live in Dunnsmouth (a play on H.P. Lovecraft’s Innsmouth), where Harrison’s adventures take place. And there’s even a bit of dialog when Ruth answers a question with “We are all completely fine.” And yes, I’m sure that was deliberate. Gregory mentions in his Afterword that after writing Harrison Squared he wanted to see what became of some of the side characters, and so The Porcelain Sisters was born.

The ending surprised me in a good way—I love the way Gregory solved Isabel’s “broken doll” problem—and I’m hoping he revisits these characters and this world again.

Big thanks to the publisher for providing a review copy.