House of Hollow by Krystal Sutherland
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
A perfectly average dark fairy tale book -- it didn't blow me away, but I still enjoyed it enough to finish it. The characters were a little bland for me, but the rich descriptions of settings kept me going. This book was grosser than I was expecting it to be, and I liked that.
What I didn't like:
- characters were kind of flat, and there was maybe one significant character arc
- the villain was not interesting until late in the story
- this is a really big nitpick, so I don't fault the book for this and I'm not factoring it into my rating, but the flowers in this book really bothered me. In the story, they are explicitly described as flowers that emulate the smell of corpses to attract flies, that one of the main characters had learned about in school; carrion flowers. This is all fine and good, and it was cool to see a very interesting plant brought up in this book. But the flowers were described as these dainty little white flowers on thin stems, and real-life carrion flowers are huge and thick and dark green/red. Again, it's a stupid nitpick, but it irked me a lot since the book tried to pass these off as real flowers in the real world.
What I did like:
- almost every scene was described by smell. it got a little repetitive at times, but overall I appreciated the atmosphere. the book doesn't pull its punches with describing the smell of rot in every conceivable way
- some genuinely chilling scenes and concepts, especially towards the end
Again, this wasn't a horrible book; it had a pretty compelling mystery and despite sort-of flat characters, the settings were compelling enough for me to keep reading until the end. I have to wonder if part of my blasé attitude is because I'm starting to age out of YA books. Or it may be because I'm on a sci-fi kick right now and this didn't fit into that at all (my own fault for choosing to read a modern fantasy when my heart is singing for space operas). But whatever the reason, I think if you're interested in this book then you should check it out. It delivers on what it promises: pretty girls with old-school fae powers in a dark fairy tale missing-person mystery. You get exactly what it offers, and I think what it was offering just wasn't for me.
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