Book Reviews – Shannon Hollinger

This week I read:

Two teachers quit their jobs and decide to build a house themselves in a remote Vermont town on land that used to be owned by witches. This book had a really interesting take on the whole haunted house trope – the freshest execution I’ve read in a while. It was a bit sluggish at times, and I didn’t love the writer’s style in the beginning, but by the end I couldn’t put it down because I had to know what happened!

This book was super creepy. Something bad is going down in the cities of the world, so the MC is on her way to pick up her aunt to take her to her sister’s compound, where they hope to stay safe. Except she gets in a wreck on the way, and can’t remember what was going on, how her wreck happened, how she got her injuries, or how she ended up in a secret mansion hidden in the woods with a strange man.

There’s so much suspense while you’re waiting for the reveals to start rolling in, because there were so many ways this one could have gone. Then it lost me a bit at the end for a couple of reasons. I won’t be reading the sequel, but I very much enjoyed this one.

I just started:

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This week I read:

I was surprised when I looked at the reviews for this one to discover that many readers liked it more than the first – it’s not often that a sequel exceeds the original, but after finishing the book I have to admit that this story was on fire! Not quite as good as the first, but pretty close! High stakes, high tension, and high action will leave you breathless! In this one, November leaves the Academy and takes us on an adrenaline ride across oceans, beneath cities, and inside the darkest corners of a Secret Society in an attempt to save her father.

I was really excited to receive this ARC of a YA horror book by the author of “Bird Box” and “Malorie”. The premise sounded incredibly creepy (I mean, a house at the bottom of a lake!) and while the book delivered all the spooks and chills, I’d have to say it falls more into the speculative category than horror, and I was a little underwhelmed. While a good, quick read, I wanted more – more depth from the YA characters, more horror in the plot, and more like I was a part of the story – the narrative didn’t draw me in and make me feel as vested as I would have liked.

I just started: