A creepy premise, a strong hook, and a quickly moving plot will capture less-critical readers.
A fresh start turns into a living nightmare when Parker is the first to fall in a high-stakes game of Ring Around the Rosie.
At first, an unexpected and sudden move away from Washington, D.C., to a new town seems like exactly the break Parker needs to escape the consequences of her own bad decisions. But from the moment she arrives in Coronation, Massachusetts, and notices a strange, cloying scent in the air, it seems as if something sinister is brewing beneath the idyllic, charming surface of the town. As she delves deeper into the mystery surrounding Rosamund, the saintlike figure who saved the town’s original settlers, she receives a warning from a mysterious boy that she doesn’t understand until it’s too late—and she again finds herself in the center of a bad situation. This time, though, she is the one who has been betrayed, and she may not escape with her life. This enjoyable if not particularly groundbreaking story contains many of the hallmarks of good campy horror—too-convenient plot points, shallow characterization, forewarned betrayal—and leans heavily on visceral descriptions and well-crafted suspense rather than deeply resonant characters. More seasoned fans of the genre may find things to be a bit too formulaic, but newer horror readers and those likely to be intimidated by longer, denser works should find much entertainment here. Main characters default to White.
A creepy premise, a strong hook, and a quickly moving plot will capture less-critical readers. (Horror. 13-18)Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-338-79401-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A pulse-pounding thriller.
Two girls fight for their lives following a terrifying drive through the Oregon mountains.
Brooke Goodwin has been on her very best behavior since “the incident” at her family’s lake house. Her father is under consideration for appointment to a judgeship, and she can’t do anything that will bring further shame to her family. But the day she finds out that she achieved her dream of getting into Yale, there’s a party at the beach and her crush, Dylan, is going to be there. How can she say no when her best friend, Jena, insists that they go? Brooke has been keeping a big secret from Jena and their other friends, however—she’s been the target of a campaign of anonymous harassment from someone who believes there was more to “the incident” than the official story. And when an old Bronco starts tailgating them on the remote drive home from the party, eventually causing an accident that sends the girls running into the woods, more than one secret is revealed. As the events of the pursuit play out, readers will feel ill at ease, then frightened, and then terrified right along with the characters. Teen thriller fans will be riveted. Brooke presents white, Jena is Black, and Dylan is described as being “like a genetic blend of Henrys, both Golding and Cavill.”
A pulse-pounding thriller. (Thriller. 13-18)Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781728270142
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Sourcebooks Fire
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An unconvincing attempt at a holiday-themed thriller.
A serial killer terrorizes a group of university friends in the weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day.
White university student Lylah has complicated feelings about Valentine’s Day, as it marks the day her parents died two years prior. Though she has adjusted to her new life at school, where she lives with five friends and housemates, old anxieties arise when her housemates begin receiving mysterious, threatening notes a few weeks before Valentine’s Day. What is initially dismissed as a sick holiday prank becomes deadly serious when one of them is discovered brutally murdered on campus. The police become involved, providing rather ineffective security to the group of friends as they are stalked and hunted around town by an unknown murderer. Lylah and her friends jump to a hasty assumption about the killer’s identity early on and begin referring to the killer by the name of a former friend whom they suspect, improbably convinced that it must be him, excluding any other possibilities in the process. Classic slasher tropes are invoked frequently and repetitively, to highly implausible effect. The result of these unlikely plot developments, combined with flimsy dialogue and weak characterization, requires so much suspension of disbelief that it renders the story more comical than horrifying.
An unconvincing attempt at a holiday-themed thriller. (Thriller. 14-18)Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4926-5432-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Sourcebooks Fire
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
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