I am Conflicted about how I feel about this book. This si my first Christina Henry book and I feel given all the buzz I have heard about her retellings, and writing in general, I was expecting more on the dark, creepy, and bizarre side.

To start Horseman, is NOT a retelling of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, it is more of an inspired follow up novel to the original tale, so honestly the title irritates me. Now I will be the first to admit that I actually have not read the original legend, but I have seen the movie and the cartoon so I know it fairly well. But with that said there were many moments where I was like "wait is that what happened in the original?".

Horseman actually follows Ben who lives in Sleepy Hollow and the grandchild of Brom Van Brunt and Katrina Van Tassel, and within this quite strange village boys start coming up dead, the heads and hands cut off. Sounds eerie right, well for the moments that Henry goes into detail yes its eerie and kind of disgusting but it was minimal, and not reoccurring through out the story. So the story does in fact not revolve around the Horseman, it is actually revolved around some other creature that is haunting Sleepy Hollow. Now as for who or what this creature is, it did become very obvious how it was going to play out and I had guessed it long before the "twist" came up and that was disappointing since I had Henry's twists were always unpredictable.

The story honestly spent more time focusing on Ben's gender. So much time is spent on Ben telling everyone that he is a boy and trying to be accepted by his grandmother Katrina, that the mystery around the dead boys feels more like a subplot and not the main plot. I don't have any issue with the idea of the gender subplot, I just think it was handled in a way that made it overshadow the actual story that was suppose to be told which inadvertently ruined the flow of the story numerous times. The overall pacing felt all over the place though.

The Horseman doesn't actually appear until the very end and honestly I'm not sure what actually happened in that bit. The whole end of the story for whatever reason just did not click in my head, something did not connect and I'm not sure why.

The writing is pretty and it did have that Gothic feel to it, but like I stated earlier the pacing was all over the place and it made it hard to stay focused.

I'm conflicted over all about how I feel about this, I'm not sure if I thought it was good or bad so for now I'm going with in the middle, it wasn't terrible but it also was not amazing.