The Hollow - Jessica Verday

 

When Abbey's best friend, Kristen, vanishes at the bridge near Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, everyone else is all too quick to accept that Kristen is dead...and rumors fly that her death was no accident. Abbey goes through the motions of mourning her best friend, but privately, she refuses to believe that Kristen is really gone.

 

Then she meets Caspian, the gorgeous and mysterious boy who shows up out of nowhere at Kristen's funeral and keeps reappearing in Abbey's life. Caspian clearly has secrets of his own, but he's the only person who makes Abbey feel normal again...but also special.

Just when Abbey starts to feel that she might survive all this, she learns a secret that makes her question everything she thought she knew about her best friend. How could Kristen have kept silent about so much? And could this secret have led to her death?

 

As Abbey struggles to understand Kristen's betrayal, she uncovers a frightening truth that nearly unravels her - one that will challenge her emerging love for Caspian, as well as her own sanity.

Okay, so I'm a bit frustrated today, boys and girls. I read this book with this beautiful, amazing cover and this fantastic summary. The book is called The Hollow (as in the story of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving) by Jessica Verday.

It's the first book in a trilogy. It started out sooo great. We have Abby, the main character, who just lost her best friend Kristen. She just met this incredibly hot guy who claims his name is Caspian Crane, who's handsome and considerate and clever and an "older man" (he's two years older than Abby, I believe). This book has sooo much going for it!

So just so we're clear, a) this review is going to be short, b) it is FULL of spoilers, and c) this book disappointed me a lot. Which stinks! Because the writing is actually really good! And I love slow-steamers where it takes a bit to get going with the action and creepy stuff. That's one reason I love Nevermore, by Kelly Creagh! And there were neat-o quotes from "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" at the beginning of each chapter, too!

BUT!

This book disappointed me. I'm sorry, Ms. Verday, but you made me a crud-ton of promises with both the summary and the first 3/5 of the book, and you did not deliver. I am sad now.

So the basic plot of this book is given out in the summary. Abby's friend Kristen is missing and presumed dead, Abby doesn’t believe she's gone, there's suspicion of foul play, Kristen was apparently hiding something, there's a hot guy named Caspian that Abby falls for, she makes friends with this nice elderly couple who Caspian despises for some reason, and there's this big secret or secrets that make Abby question Kristen, Caspian, the old people, and her own sanity. Plot in a nutshell, and all of it pretty exciting, right?

Wrong. It could have been exciting. It could have been so cool and gasp-worthy. But it wasn't.

Is Kristen really dead? Yes.

Is she a ghost or a zombie or any other cool undead thing? No. Which wouldn’t be a problem except that the question of Kristen's death or non-death was belabored to the point that, along with Abby's recurring and seemingly psychic dreams of her, if she's not dead, or there is something weird going on with that whole thing, we should have found out about it in this book, or at least gotten some kind of hint. We didn't.

And the book is pretty long. At least 100,000 words. Now maybe we did get a hint—the dreams, for instance—and it was just too subtle for me, but I don't think so, because a character who would know told Abby Kristen was dead, legitimately no-ghosty-resurrection dead, and we've had no indications that Abby has any powers that would supersede this character's proclamation on said death.

Suspicion of foul play regarding Kristen's death is toyed with throughout the book, but is never confirmed nor denied. We don't even get anything beyond a hint that someone other than Fate or Chance might've been involved. She drowned crossing a river known for its dangers (Abby and Kristen even had a rule about never crossing alone, because you could slip, fall in, and drown—which is basically what happened) and the only hint that someone might know something is, we discover Kristen had a secret boyfriend.

Not that he was physically abusive or threatened her or anything. Just that he existed and was the "typical" teenage boyfriend who sent his girlfriend spiraling through the ups and downs of "young love." And we don't even discover that until about halfway through the book, and that particular subplot never really goes anywhere, either. Abby considers the idea that the secret boyfriend might be involved somehow or know something maybe, but it's a brief thought that whisks away within twenty pages.

The big secret that wrecks everything? Caspian and the old people, Katy and Nikolas (an elderly married couple) are ghosts. Which would be cool if they had some kind of destiny or prophecy to deal with or there was some kind of dark fate awaiting them that we find out about in this book!

But we don't. If anything looms on the horizon for these three, we don't find out about it here. Why does Caspian despise the old people? That's never actually explained, except that he knows they're ghosts and it freaks him out. Does he know he's a ghost? Yes. So why does it freak him out? Not really explained.

The big secret that wrecks Abby's fond love for Kristen and makes her feel betrayed (Kristen's still her best friend, but she's mad at her now)? Kristen's secret boyfriend. I don't know, I'd like to think I wouldn’t spaz out about it like Abby does. I'd want to know why my best friend wouldn’t tell me something like that, and maybe I'd be a little hurt, but I wouldn’t get angry about it.

Also, just a pet peeve, Caspian's hair is ridiculous. One black streak amidst platinum blond. I've only seen bizarre-colored lhair ike that it two things (Daughter of Smoke and Bone and Fruit's Basket) and it worked then, but it didn't work now. For one thing, the timing's off. He got the black streak, which identifies him as this one type of ghost called a Shade, from a near-death experience that happened ten years before he died!

The cool things in this book: Katy and Nikolas's true identities. That was pretty epic. Also, Abby (for the most part). She makes perfume. Perfume! How freaking cool is that? Gotta also admire a girl who can make perfume that smells like snickerdoodles. Also, the fact that the author managed to integrate Abby's school and work into the story, as well as cover half a year of time so smoothly in one book. And the characters are all very fleshed out and three-dimensional, and the writing is technically good. Her descriptions and settings rock, too.

BUT!
 
The big problem: a lot of promises that fall short on delivery. Supposedly there's a lot of danger and mystery and spooky stuff in this book. No, there's really not. No danger at all, in fact. I'm going to read book two, The Haunted, with the desperate hope that some stuff actually happens and I find out what the big deal is, but this book just made me sad and disappointed me. It was almost like the ghosts were an afterthought, in a way. Like, "I need something to make Caspian's come-hither-stay-away thing not douchey, and to make Katy and Nikolas exciting. I know! I'll make them ghosts." It probably (hopefully) becomes a bigger thing in book two. We'll see.

Honestly, this book gets 2/5 stars. The two stars are for the creative bits I mentioned above, and for the technical writing skill. But I wouldn’t buy this book, unless I saw it with the pretty cover in hardback for like, a dollar or two (that's a bargain) and didn't have to pay $4 shipping from Amazon. If someone gave it to me, I'd be happy, but I wouldn’t get excited about it.

Hopefully The Haunted impresses me enough to change my opinion.

Signing off,

LA Knight

PS - here's why I'm willing to read book 2: the cover art!