My Five Word TL:DR Review: Didn’t Really Work For Me

I enjoyed The Hollows by this author so was really looking forward to this one but ultimately it just didn’t work it’s magic. But, first things first.

This gets off to a very intriguing start.  Jenna and her mother are travelling when their car breaks down.  Stranded in the forest things escalate quickly and Jenna’s mother disappears.  Fast forward and Jenna is 30 (ish), the mystery of her mother was never solved and has left her with severe trauma and trust issues  She struggles to hold down a relationship for more than a couple of months until recently meeting Holly.  The two, on the face of it, feel like opposites, but they click somehow.  They’ve just returned from a camping holiday, not something Jenna would usually undertake as she remains afraid of the forest since that terrible night when her mother went missing.

From here the story takes a completely different tack and not one that I was particularly expecting.  The horror wasn’t what I was hoping for, don’t get me wrong, the situation that Jenna finds herself in is definitely horrific, claustrophobic and anger inducing – and I don’t want to go into detail here as it’s probably best discovered during the read – but it simply wasn’t what I was hoping for.

So, what did and didn’t work for me.

I liked the ancient evil that is at play.  It’s a terrifying beast and there were some very creepy moments whenever it put in an appearance.

There are a couple of occasions where Jenna is, let’s say, making a break out – I found these gripping and tense.

In terms of criticisms.  I found it very difficult to like any of the characters and this is really a problem for me.  I wanted to like Jenna, she’s been through a lot and in fact continues to experience some terrible situations, but I didn’t find myself really caring.  The same with the relationship with Jenna and Holly, it just felt very flat, they didn’t really come across as though they even liked each other to be honest, it was all super prickly.  And, this is a small niggle, but the constant use of the word ‘babe’, it really irritated me, to the point I was actually becoming really grumpy and skipping over the dialogue in order to avoid it.  On top of that, I’m not really a lover of dream sequences in stories and they play quite an integral part here.  They rarely work for me.

I think some of my issues literally fall into the ‘its me not you’ category.  There were some exciting moments, some tense scenes and the final chapters rolled out more of the horror that I was expecting.  It just felt like a lot to get through in order to get to that point.

I received a copy through Netgalley, courtesy of the publisher, for which my thanks.  The above is my own opinion.

My rating 2.5 of 5 stars (rounded to 3)