Review: Crow Mountain by Lucy Inglis

Publication Date: September 3^rd 2015
Publisher: Chicken House Books
Length: 368 pages

Huge thanks to Chicken House for sending me a copy in exchange for an honest review

While on holiday in Montana, Hope meets local boy Cal Crow, a ranch hand. Caught in a freak accident, the two of them take shelter in a mountain cabin where Hope makes a strange discovery. More than a hundred years earlier, another English girl met a similar fate. Her rescuer: a horse-trader called Nate. 
In this wild place, both girls learn what it means to survive and to fall in love, neither knowing that their fates are intimately entwined.

This was a surprising novel, one I knew very little about going in, but everything I had heard had more than caught my interest and I was very intrigued going in. The novel gets off to a fairly slow start. I found I was more interested in Hope’s story than Emily’s, and whilst it was enjoyable, it wasn’t quite piquing my interest as I’d hoped. However it is a sly and crafty novel. It creeps up on you, its slow pacing and quiet tones mean that you don’t realise just how deeply you’ve come to care and love these characters until something happens and you find yourself sitting on the floor in floods of tears at three in the morning because it just broke your heart.

And whilst it was busy distracting me with surreptitious feelings, I realised that I had somewhere along the way become more invested in Emily’s story as opposed to Hope’s. Hope’s was interesting and I did enjoy it, but it felt like we didn’t get nearly as much time with Hope and Cal. Whilst we got to see Emily and Nate’s relationship develop and evolve over the course of several months, we only spent a few days with Hope and Cal, and by the end that discrepancy really showed. I was much more invested in Emily’s storyline and I found myself really caring for and rooting for these characters, whereas I wanted it all to turn out ok for Hope and Cal, but it wasn’t the same level of emotional investment.

The slow development of Emily and Nate’s relationship was so well handled. I found myself with a set of expectations for Nate when he is first introduced, and he spends the entire novel shooting them down and being a completely different kind of hero, in the best possible way. It’s a soft, slow build of a relationship that left me feeling more than a little mushy and teary by the end. He and Emily quickly cemented themselves as one of my favourite fictional pairings.

However the last section of the novel didn’t work as well for me. Suddenly both storylines pick up the pace, everything happens at once and Lucy uses a sneaky trick of playing on the readers expectations, which is cleverly done but not something I’m a fan of in most stories. It just felt like so much time was given to developing the story and then the last part was just BOOM, and we’re done. I wanted more of a payoff after coming to care so much about these characters.

So with the slow start and slightly off ending, no matter how much I loved the rest of the book I didn’t feel I could give it a full five stars, however it is definitely a solid four. A surprising read that really crept up on me when I least expected it with a beautiful love story woven through its pages.

Review: Darkmere by Helen Maslin

Publication Date: August 6^th 2015
Publisher: Chicken House
Length: 368 pages

Huge thanks to Chicken House for sending me a copy in exchange for an honest review

A castle. A curse. A dangerous summer. Leo has invited Kate and a few friends to spend the summer at his inheritance, Darkmere Castle: as wild and remote as it is beautiful. Kate thinks it will be the perfect place for her and Leo to get together - but instead, she's drawn into the dark story of a young nineteenth-century bride who haunts the tunnels and towers of the house. And whose curse now hangs over them all.

This book was delightfully creepy, and in some places downright terrifying. Seriously, I had to take Joey’s advice and put it in the freezer and take a time out at one point. (If you do not get that reference go and watch Friends, now.) (If you don’t believe me there is photographic evidence…)

I do not normally read scary books, I am a non-scary things kinda person. Don’t do horror films, don’t do scary books – so this was quite a departure for me, but it was so good that it was totally worth the nightmares. (Also true, ask my husband, I was jabbering about there being ghosts and creepy things in the house trying to kill me…)

It’s a dual narrative, one point of view with Kate who’s a very modern girl out for a summer adventure with a band of people from school including the enigmatic Leo who has just inherited this supposedly cursed castle. Then there’s Elinor, the original St Cloud bride, who finds herself trapped in an increasingly desperate and frightening situation. I found myself caring equally for both girls by the end, although during the story I would find myself favouring one over the other purely as the narrative fluxed over each high tension point and then relaxed again. I loved watching the two girls stories flesh out, seeing how they intertwined and watching events snowball out of control as all the pieces came crashing together for a truly nail biting climax.

This is a book that isn’t afraid to go all out and scare the pants off you. Some books will shy away from committing when there are ghostly elements involved, wanting to keep you guessing, but Helen decides firmly on her stance with this book and then brings out the big guns to weave an underlying tension that grows and tightens throughout, but also peaks into some truly chilling scenes along the way.

It’s an intriguing mix of characters, and I loved how you start out with a certain set of stereotypes in the modern thread, but those are gradually picked apart and evolve into three dimensional people. Every person starts out as the front they offer to the world, and I loved watching the castle, the isolation and the atmosphere chip away at each of them so that what you’re left with at the end are some very different people to those you thought were embarking on this summer holiday. Most notable is Kate, and I loved watching her start to embrace who she is, to come to terms with aspects of herself, and to start to break down some walls.

This is a fantastic book, a terrifying and brilliant debut from Helen, and I cannot wait to see what she writes next!

Review: Flashes by Tim O'Rourke

Huge thanks to Chicken House for sending me a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

Flashes is the first in a new series of YA paranormal crime novels in which a 17-year-old girl cannot help seeing glimpses of dead people who seem to want her aid - much to the consternation of her boyfriend, who has just started work for the local CID.
This review is for the full paperback version rather than the three separate releases.

I think I am in the minority when I say that I really didn’t enjoy ‘Flashes’. It’s an exciting premise, and Charley had the potential to be a truly fascinating character, but unfortunately what was a brilliant idea never really took off for me.

The biggest problem was the obviousness of the plot, within the first twenty odd pages I had already worked out who the killer was, and whenever a large plot point like that is obvious it ruins my enjoyment of the rest of the book.

The second problem was the flatness of the characters. I wanted to like them, I wanted to feel involved, and Charley had the potential to be a fantastic heroine. Unfortunately the characters never felt fully realized, whether due to the length of the book or the concentration on the mystery elements I am not entirely sure.

It just didn’t sit quite right with me. The dialogue was awkward, particularly between any female characters where it felt contrived and stereotyped. The characters never really came alive from the page, and where it could have been saved by the plot it fell again by, in my opinion, making the villain of the story far too obvious from the start.

The idea was fantastic, and the tension at points was brilliantly done, which makes me wonder whether if I had read this story in the original three parts instead of all at once, whether I would have enjoyed it more.

If you’re after a quick, paranormal crime to read then I do definitely recommend giving this a go, because it has had a good reception from most. However I personally didn’t find it to be as good as I had expected from the blurb and felt let down by the characterization and plot.