The Curse of Sara Douroux by C.A. Wittman

The year is 1985 and Sara Douroux lives with her deeply religious, elderly parents in a rural area of Maui. Discouraged from building friendships in school, she leads a private and old-fashioned life. When the family receives an odd letter that announces the impending arrival of four mysterious young cousins, Sara’s life soon turns tumultuous. Trying to make sense of the peculiar children, she forms a tenuous friendship with an unlikely pair: Jenny, a shy newcomer to the island from California, and Sunami, a tomboyish local girl.

As the girls uncover clues about Sara’s cousins, a chilling truth begins to take shape. An insidious terror is sweeping through the small valley where they live, threatening the lives of the community. In a race to discover the truth about Sara’s relatives and the secrets of her dark past, the girls realize to their horror that time is running out.

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

I received a complimentary copy for review.