Reviews with content warning for Death of parent - Perfectly Preventable Deaths

It started mild enough: two twin sisters move to a mysterious little town as a result of their mother's second marriage, and then one gets obsessed with an older guy who is clearly bad news while the other struggles to figure out all sorts of things: what to do about her sister's destructive romance, what to make of this strange new place, how to figure out her own sexuality. There's also witchcraft. Dark and disturbing things happening in the local woods. Promises of more creepiness to come.

For the first 2/3 to 3/4 of the book, the story mostly stays rooted in the regular confusing teenage experience, with some mystery/witchy stuff added in for flavor, and it does the job rather well. Maddie's struggles are relatable. Lon, the older guy, is clearly a creepy abuser whether there's anything supernatural about him or not. The twins' family relationships are compelling.

Then, in the final part, the author decides to deliver on all those dark and disturbing promises, and my, does she go all out. There were several scenes there, in rapid succession, that made me physically cringe. I wish I was more thorough about checking the trigger warnings going in.

I mostly like the conclusion everything worked up to, but that last part was honestly jarring. It didn't come out of nowhere; it did flow quite logically out of all the earlier foreshadowing. But I felt like some of it was sort of too much for a young adult book somehow.

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al3x's review against another edition

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dark mysterious slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? N/A
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? N/A
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

This story was intriguing. It had many elements of mystery and mysticism. Ireland, where the story takes place, is a fairy tale fueled land and it had that going for it. The novel started slow, and it kept that pace for most of the story. I did not mind it and just sunk into this slow narrative of beautiful prose. The author has a nice writing style, like a river flowing taking the reader seamlessly to every plot point.

The story begins with a pair of twin girls and their mother moving to their stepdad’s huge castle where they will live. Being uprooted from their home and friends to move to a small town poses many different challenges for them and we get to see them try to adapt. One of the girls is more religious while the other timider is into some very witchy practices. I liked the witchy aspects of the story and was hoping for more. The main protagonist in Maddy is the more mature character and her sister, Catlin comes off as extremely bratty most of the time. Catlin gets herself a boyfriend, Lon, and inserts herself into a cozy codependent slot. Nothing else matters to her more than him now. Everything she does is to please him. I really hoped there might be some supernatural explanation for this, as the character of Lon, later on, is exposed to be some supernatural creature. So the fact that he got a Regina George Queen Bee like Catlin to be so crazy about him and be blinded to danger seemed a little disrespectful to her independent personality (which, to be fair we mostly hear about from her sister’s thoughts in the story. We are told rather than shown that Catlin is a queen bee).

There are, of course, some other drawbacks. The whole mystery of these murdered girls in the village they moved to, fell completely flat on its face, plunging down on the hard concrete with a splat. I really thought for the whole novel, that Lon as the killer would be a red Herring and that the stepfather, Brian, would in fact be the real killer. This surprised me, not because the character of Lon wasn't anything but sleazy, but it was too obvious, and that made Catlin completely naive. Not only that but the killer, Lon, is some sort of creature, half human half something else (the author is vague on the details) which never gets fully explored. He is something not completely human and….nothing. Ok?! Then, ALL the names of the girls he killed, he actually wrote on the walls of a cave easily accessible by the stepfather and Mamo ( a witchy mentor to Maddy), from their very home by way of hidden tunnels in the walls of the castle. I really do not understand how that slipped by them. The plot needed it, and so it was, for no reason, especially since they both knew about the tunnels. Mamo used them herself.

Tragedy then hit, because Catlin is an idiot, so Lon chomped her up inside the walls where the tunnels are. Her twin saves and heals her. We then find out that this town they’ve been living in is home to shapeshifters and all kinds of possible supernatural elements. Those shapeshifters helped look for Catlin, and then nothing again. This just gets a mention and is not explored AT ALL.

After all that we reach the epilogue. We know from the very beginning that the girls’ father died a weird mysterious death, in the forest, burnt alive but without anything else around his body getting burnt. In the epilogue we see him being chased in the forest by two men, one younger one older. Again there are no details, so I did not get who burnt him, Brian, and his father? Brian and Lon? And why?

I don’t know, I really liked the vibe of this story but in the end, it just did not deliver and only casually mentions these grand awesome things that never come into the spotlight.

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thoroughlyenjoyedbooks's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

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