5 stars About three-quarters of the way into this book, I didn’t want to go to sleep at night. I tried, but I tossed and turned, with images from the Hollow Place and Kara and Simon’s escape cycling through my mind. This was a tense, edge-of-your-seat, nail-biter of a horror story, complete with monsters that were at once horrific and indescribable. In fact, some of the author’s descriptions were so vivid and original that (despite being instructed by Netgalley not to quote from the ARC because of potential changes by the time the final book is published) I simply must share a few. Hopefully, these quotes are still valid because they were so remarkable and it would be a shame if they were changed. This description of the Hollow Place is eerie: “If you play video games, sometimes you’ll encounter a bug where you suddenly fall through the world. Something goes wonky and the landscape that is pretending to be solid suddenly isn’t. And you fall through and suddenly you see that the whole virtual world is just a skin a pixel deep, and you’re looking at it from the back, like a stage set viewed from behind. All the shapes are still there, all the rocks and mountains and trees, but inverted. You can stand inside things that looked solid just a minute ago and look up through trees that are suddenly chimneys. I was getting the strangest feeling that the willows were somehow like that. If I dug one up, it wouldn’t have roots, it would just be attached to the sand, a thin willow-shaped skin made of the same stuff as the islands and the river. As if the willows and the river were...not artificial, exactly, but behind them was something vast and hollow. Hollow, but not empty.” I absolutely loved the voice of the narrator, Kara, aka Carrot by her friends and family. Simon makes a great foil for her sense of humor, the two of them riffing off of one another and somehow finding humor in the worst of situations. Like when they come upon an abandoned space with a rosary hanging on the wall and Simon says, “No matter where you go, the Jesuits got there first.” It’s all told from the POV of Kara, so although we only know what Simon says out loud, we are privy to Kara’s inner thoughts, and they cracked me up. For example, she recalls a memory, “When I was five or six, I saw Bambi, because this is a baffling thing that parents still do to their children.” At one point, she describes the museum cat, Beauregard, as having “a personality like a benevolent feline Genghis Kahn.” And when first encountering the disorientation that is surely involved in discovering an alternate world, Kara thinks, “My internal clock had shorted out and was blinking 12:00.” There are shared jokes with Simon about his left eye being a result of devouring his female twin in the womb, resulting in color blindness and an ability to see things not seen by the ordinary eye. The jokes about black mold are particularly amusing as they try to figure out whether what they are seeing is real or a result of exposure to black mold. They follow that thought down a proverbial worm hole, eventually deciding it doesn’t matter much. I guess where they lost me was when they decided to explore this strange land they had discovered when all of my internal warnings were ringing. Of course, I knew it was a horror story, but I still want to believe that I would not have explored any of this place, given the choice. And I also felt like I already knew the cause of the opening of the portal, and wondered why it wasn’t more obvious to Kara, but then, she wasn’t reading about it and I was so I was privy to hints from the author which she was not. The author’s attention to detail and world-building was exceptional. She created a museum that I could almost see in my mind’s eye and an alternate world that I’d prefer not to see (but could). There were some complicated images, yet the author managed to guide the reader with little need to go back and read something again for clarification. Likewise, characters were multi-dimensional, relatable, and more than anything, memorable. I am a new fan of this author and I look forward to reading more of her books. October 30, 2020
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Elizabeth J ConnorWriter. Editor. Proofreader. Archives
September 2022
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