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When people go missing in the sleepy town of Smith's Hollow, the only clue to their fate comes when a teenager starts having terrifying visions, in a chilling horror novel from national bestselling author Christina Henry. When the bodies of two girls are found torn apart in the town of Smiths Hollow, Lauren is surprised, but she also expects that the police won't find the killer. After all, the year before her father's body was found with his heart missing, and since then everyone has moved on. Even her best friend, Miranda, has become more interested in boys than in spending time at the old ghost tree, the way they used to when they were kids. So when Lauren has a vision of a monster dragging the remains of the girls through the woods, she knows she can't just do nothing. Not like the rest of her town. But as she draws closer to answers, she realizes that the foundation of her seemingly normal town might be rotten at the center. And that if nobody else stands for the missing, she will.
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TW// ED, gore, underage sex, abuse
So... I, unfortunately, was quite close to dropping this around halfway through. I picked it up on release day, I was excited for this book for a while. I really enjoy her fairy tale retelling novels! With this book, however, she seemed to have decided to try multiple new things at once and... I can't say it works.
The way the book is structured is a bit convoluted. Each chapter is told from a different character's point of view. No 2 consecutive chapters are from the same character. Sometimes as well the timeline won't match up correctly. Sometimes the next chapter will lead on after the previous chapter, sometimes they'll overlap and there's nothing obvious to state the differences. You just have to try and work it out either after you've read the chapter or halfway through. Having about 6-8 characters in PoV chapters makes everything just so confusing. Who's the main character? Why are there about 100 different side plots? What is the actual main plotline here?
The other main thing in this for me that made me dislike it was the sheer amount of uncomfortable chapters all about underage sex (adults with underage teenagers), adults groping underage teenagers and also whole chapters filled with really uncomfortable details about a young teenagers first period. Light spoilers for the end (romantic plotline) Spoiler
Lauren, the main MAIN character who is 14 ends up being in a "good" and accepted relationship with an 18 yr old without anyone even questioning it.
There are also entire chapters of just racist characters being racist because that's all they're written to be. For one character, the first of their PoV chapters is them ranting about their Mexican neighbours with not much else.
This book would have benefitted a lot from having less "main" characters and instead taking more time to flesh out the remaining characters to make them less 2D. Halfway through the book and I was still confused to what the plot was, was this a coming of age romance book? Was this a magic book? Was this a murder mystery book? Even at the end, I'm still not 100% sure at what direction Christina wanted to take this book in and I'm not sure she knows herself either. The main murder mystery type story I did enjoy though, there was the base to what could have been a great tale.
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