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aparker89's review
adventurous
dark
emotional
hopeful
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.25
My first Christina Henry novel and wow! This book packed SO much into 301 pages and I read most of them in the course of a single evening! This is a super FAST paced book, without being juvenile or leaving loose ends! The story is fully encompassing and urges you to keep going. I personally did not love the last 30ish pages BUT it did wrap up one last tendril of the story. The climax of the story is extremely well written, well thought out and not rushed through.
I will definitely be reading more of her works!!!
I will definitely be reading more of her works!!!
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal cruelty, Blood, Body horror, Death, Death of parent, Gore, Stalking, Deadnaming, Gaslighting, Emotional abuse, Injury/Injury detail, Violence, Cannibalism, Fire/Fire injury, Grief, Transphobia, Animal death, and Child death
Moderate: Body shaming, Bullying, Colonisation, Kidnapping, Classism, Misogyny, and Torture
kris_t97's review
adventurous
dark
mysterious
reflective
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Interesting range of characters with a different take on the Sleepy Hollow/ Headless Horseman tale. A decent balance of human and supernatural horror as well.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Child death, Death, Death of parent, Body horror, and Injury/Injury detail
Moderate: Stalking, Misogyny, Kidnapping, Grief, Fire/Fire injury, and Murder
Minor: Deadnaming and Animal death
thesaltiestlibrarian's review
dark
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
1.0
Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC. The opinions expressed herein are mine alone and may not reflect the views of the author, publisher, or distributor.
The more I think about this book, the angrier I get. A lot of spoilers coming up, so brace yourselves and bow out now if you're not into them.
HORSEMAN starts off with a grisly murder being discovered in the woods of Sleepy Hollow. The grandchild of Brom Bones is out playing with his friend when the body of a kid their age is discovered dead in the field, lacking his head and hands. This kicks off a whole rigmarole. People start blaming the Horseman, but Ben knows it can't be him. The Horseman isn't cruel. Then people are like, "Whatever happened to Ichabod Crane, anyway?" And only one person in town knows: Ben's banana-pants maternal grandfather. When two more kids drop like flies, the investigation gets more serious.
Lol just kidding. It totally doesn't.
Everyone blames Ben for the deaths because he's the one who finds the bodies.
Listen. That's the summary. Boom, done. Now we get into what made this book a mess.
The Plot
Or lack thereof, because the mystery only takes up bits and pieces of the story. I cannot describe to you what a huge chunk of this book was Ben fawning over his grandfather. The strongest, biggest, loyalest, most perfect-est man in the entire world. That's Brom Bones. And Ben wants to be just like him when he grows up. Paragraphs and paragraphs of this, even well past the halfway mark. Come the heck on, Ben, we get it. Fawn over someone else for a minute. Gracious.
And made worse by this is the fact that Ben was born as a girl, so the transgender commentary is questionable at best. It's brought up every single chapter that "I'm not a girl, I'm a boy" and that people always think Ben is weird, and Brom always refers to Ben as a boy because of how he and Katrina lost their son Bendix, and on and on and on. It's never expounded, never explored, and never wrapped up until the end--which I'll get to, cuz hoo boy.
Wouldn't you think that teen boys having their heads and hands bitten off, and their bodies literally melting shortly after, would cause the entire town to bring up pitchforks and torches 18th-century style and bang down doors in the dead of night? Nope, not in Sleepy Hollow! Apparently everyone's cool with throwing around accusations and then forgetting they need to look for some of the OTHER missing people from years before, too.
I'm sorry, what? Small-town upstate New York doesn't raise a stink over this? I'm surprised that there wasn't an entire witch hunt and people being dragged into the street to be flogged. Small-town Maine in the freaking 21st century is a nosy man's paradise. It would be even worse before crap like Facebook and Twitter.
Three-fourths of the plot is Ben running around the woods, arguing with his grandmother Katrina, telling us about the history of Sleepy Hollow and showing us next to nothing, refuting people who call him a girl, and finding corpses in the woods. And there weren't even that many corpses! I'm so disappointed that there wasn't a bloodbath.
The Conflict
Ben's banana-pants maternal grandfather is a creepy old dude who pretends to know exactly what's happening, and guess what! He totally does. But he's also a mean old codger who hates literally everyone and everything, so he keeps to himself and no one bothers him to get information. Again, small-town mobs would burn down his house if he locked himself inside it if they even suspected he might have something to do with the murders.
Some of the townsfolk raise a beef with Brom because of the guy's inaction and protection of Ben when everyone thought it was "that little witch" who was killing the boys. And to be fair, I'd suspect Brom too. He tries to calm everyone down and constantly defends his family instead of saying, "Hey, so we should find out what's actually happening so that my family isn't the main suspect pool here." But he doesn't! He just says, "Nah, not my little Ben. C'mon, little Ben, and let's go home and forget this happened."
Like...dude! Your grandchild's other grandfather is under zero suspicion, and he's crazier than a shithouse rat! Approximately zero percent of the people in Sleepy Hollow trust him, and you're worried about just going home for dinner??? How is brushing this off a good idea?! And does BEN, the one who's found most of the bodies, even attempt to find out what's killing the boys? Yes, and it's really stupid. Which leads us to:
The Reveal
Hey, remember that little issue with the original legend of Sleepy Hollow? That one guy who kinda up and disappeared and no one bothered to look for him? Yeah, that guy. Ichabod Crane. Turns out, he didn't die. He just got turned into a shadow monster with a thirst for blood, and how did he get turned into that? Oh, that banana-pants shithouse rat, of course! Schuler, Ben's grandfather, is actually a mystical creature from the Old World, and in order to pass on his legacy he needs a son. Whoops! His wife produced a daughter, cuz women are definitely capable of controlling that, amirite? Dang-flabbit, you useless female! How dare you only carry X chromosomes!
But then Bende renames herself Ben and becomes a boy, and Schuler is like, "I can work with this." And then they have one interaction a hundred pages before the final conflict.
So...last I checked, in order to train someone to take on your mantle, you need to befriend them and then actually teach them to use the powers they inherited from you. Call me crazy, I'm not a Danish warlock capable of creating shadow monsters who lust after blood. How would I know what I'm talking about?
The worst part about Ben finding out about Crane and all that is the incessant monologuing that happens before and after. First Brom goes on and on and ON about how he was the Horseman who scared away Crane, and no one is the wiser about it. Pages and pages of him and Ben riding back home in the woods, and Brom will not shut up and cut to the chase. Then Ichabod Crane reveals himself to Ben, and CRANE starts in! Paragraph on paragraph of exposition that reads tonally indistinguishable from Brom. I skimmed and missed nothing.
Why do only hands and heads get eaten? Because Crane started to eat Katrina's son Bendix, and when he saw Katrina, his love for her overwhelmed him and he ran away before he could eat the whole body. So now he's stuck eating those parts, I guess.
Why was Bendix going after Crane? Because Schuler told his son-in-law that the only way for the fever in the town to break was for Bendix to sacrifice himself to the Kludde, the Old World monster in the woods. So Bendix is like, "Sure, cool, I'll totally do that." No cross-referencing this information with his mom, who's ALSO DUTCH and would know about anything called the Kludde. Just jumping headfirst into self-sacrifice like it's noble or something.
Why did Schuler tell Bendix about the Kludde? I don't even remember, as it was never elaborated enough.
So Crane gets done monologuing and Brom shows up to find Ben, and a scuffle ensues. Crane touches Brom's chest, which starts melting away the flesh and exposes Brom's heart, and Brom gets in a single slash before he falls. That single slash is somehow enough to do in Crane, a nefarious shadow being who feeds on human blood. Okay.
The very last standoff takes place ten years after Brom's death, and it's Ben v. Schuler for the title. Ben hears the Horseman calling his name and takes off into the deeper woods to find him. Surprise! Horseman is being held in some kind of suspension by Schuler, who (GASP) is actually the Kludde! What does that mean! What does he look like! Up yours, reader, Christina Henry will never tell! Like...no, seriously. We're told that he has terrible eyes, looks darker than shadows, and has giant wings. For all we know, he could be a literal fruitbat.
Naturally, a dangerous bloodthirsty cryptid from the Old World needs to monologue. He came from the Old World (we know) to pass on his legacy, and created Crane to torment the Hollow! Commence evil laughter! But Ben wouldn't let his grandfather teach him his ways--like the old man ever offered--and is down diggety to take this guy out once and for all. Because of Ben's inherited powers, the Horseman has been real all along because Ben believed that he was real.
I'm surprised Ben didn't try to revive the Horseman's power by closing his eyes, clapping, and shouting, "I do believe in Horsemen! I do believe in Horsemen!" After the fight where the Kludde is defeated somehow (?) Ben becomes the Horseman.
Listen...
Don't ask me to explain, because I don't know how that works. The system of inheritance for magic is never elaborated upon and never even brought up until this last quarter of the book. We're told to believe all of this, but the narrative never lays down rules for how magic works in this world, or even that it exists in the first place. Monster does not always equal magic. But here, we're supposed to believe that it does and then not question why exactly zero percent of it makes sense. It's more upsetting than the "magic system" in Once Upon A Time, which is basically the Fight Club of magic systems.
First rule: don't talk about the magic system.
Second rule: you do not talk about the magic system.
Third rule: someone yells "Well, hello, pretties!", waves their hand, steals an object, you can't do the same thing to get it back cuz reasons.
Fourth rule: True Love is a magic cure-all.
I'm so disappointed. Hopes were so high for this book, but it just...crashed and burned and got eaten by Ichabod Crane. Gracious me.
The more I think about this book, the angrier I get. A lot of spoilers coming up, so brace yourselves and bow out now if you're not into them.
HORSEMAN starts off with a grisly murder being discovered in the woods of Sleepy Hollow. The grandchild of Brom Bones is out playing with his friend when the body of a kid their age is discovered dead in the field, lacking his head and hands. This kicks off a whole rigmarole. People start blaming the Horseman, but Ben knows it can't be him. The Horseman isn't cruel. Then people are like, "Whatever happened to Ichabod Crane, anyway?" And only one person in town knows: Ben's banana-pants maternal grandfather. When two more kids drop like flies, the investigation gets more serious.
Lol just kidding. It totally doesn't.
Everyone blames Ben for the deaths because he's the one who finds the bodies.
Listen. That's the summary. Boom, done. Now we get into what made this book a mess.
The Plot
Or lack thereof, because the mystery only takes up bits and pieces of the story. I cannot describe to you what a huge chunk of this book was Ben fawning over his grandfather. The strongest, biggest, loyalest, most perfect-est man in the entire world. That's Brom Bones. And Ben wants to be just like him when he grows up. Paragraphs and paragraphs of this, even well past the halfway mark. Come the heck on, Ben, we get it. Fawn over someone else for a minute. Gracious.
And made worse by this is the fact that Ben was born as a girl, so the transgender commentary is questionable at best. It's brought up every single chapter that "I'm not a girl, I'm a boy" and that people always think Ben is weird, and Brom always refers to Ben as a boy because of how he and Katrina lost their son Bendix, and on and on and on. It's never expounded, never explored, and never wrapped up until the end--which I'll get to, cuz hoo boy.
Wouldn't you think that teen boys having their heads and hands bitten off, and their bodies literally melting shortly after, would cause the entire town to bring up pitchforks and torches 18th-century style and bang down doors in the dead of night? Nope, not in Sleepy Hollow! Apparently everyone's cool with throwing around accusations and then forgetting they need to look for some of the OTHER missing people from years before, too.
I'm sorry, what? Small-town upstate New York doesn't raise a stink over this? I'm surprised that there wasn't an entire witch hunt and people being dragged into the street to be flogged. Small-town Maine in the freaking 21st century is a nosy man's paradise. It would be even worse before crap like Facebook and Twitter.
Three-fourths of the plot is Ben running around the woods, arguing with his grandmother Katrina, telling us about the history of Sleepy Hollow and showing us next to nothing, refuting people who call him a girl, and finding corpses in the woods. And there weren't even that many corpses! I'm so disappointed that there wasn't a bloodbath.
The Conflict
Ben's banana-pants maternal grandfather is a creepy old dude who pretends to know exactly what's happening, and guess what! He totally does. But he's also a mean old codger who hates literally everyone and everything, so he keeps to himself and no one bothers him to get information. Again, small-town mobs would burn down his house if he locked himself inside it if they even suspected he might have something to do with the murders.
Some of the townsfolk raise a beef with Brom because of the guy's inaction and protection of Ben when everyone thought it was "that little witch" who was killing the boys. And to be fair, I'd suspect Brom too. He tries to calm everyone down and constantly defends his family instead of saying, "Hey, so we should find out what's actually happening so that my family isn't the main suspect pool here." But he doesn't! He just says, "Nah, not my little Ben. C'mon, little Ben, and let's go home and forget this happened."
Like...dude! Your grandchild's other grandfather is under zero suspicion, and he's crazier than a shithouse rat! Approximately zero percent of the people in Sleepy Hollow trust him, and you're worried about just going home for dinner??? How is brushing this off a good idea?! And does BEN, the one who's found most of the bodies, even attempt to find out what's killing the boys? Yes, and it's really stupid. Which leads us to:
The Reveal
Hey, remember that little issue with the original legend of Sleepy Hollow? That one guy who kinda up and disappeared and no one bothered to look for him? Yeah, that guy. Ichabod Crane. Turns out, he didn't die. He just got turned into a shadow monster with a thirst for blood, and how did he get turned into that? Oh, that banana-pants shithouse rat, of course! Schuler, Ben's grandfather, is actually a mystical creature from the Old World, and in order to pass on his legacy he needs a son. Whoops! His wife produced a daughter, cuz women are definitely capable of controlling that, amirite? Dang-flabbit, you useless female! How dare you only carry X chromosomes!
But then Bende renames herself Ben and becomes a boy, and Schuler is like, "I can work with this." And then they have one interaction a hundred pages before the final conflict.
So...last I checked, in order to train someone to take on your mantle, you need to befriend them and then actually teach them to use the powers they inherited from you. Call me crazy, I'm not a Danish warlock capable of creating shadow monsters who lust after blood. How would I know what I'm talking about?
The worst part about Ben finding out about Crane and all that is the incessant monologuing that happens before and after. First Brom goes on and on and ON about how he was the Horseman who scared away Crane, and no one is the wiser about it. Pages and pages of him and Ben riding back home in the woods, and Brom will not shut up and cut to the chase. Then Ichabod Crane reveals himself to Ben, and CRANE starts in! Paragraph on paragraph of exposition that reads tonally indistinguishable from Brom. I skimmed and missed nothing.
Why do only hands and heads get eaten? Because Crane started to eat Katrina's son Bendix, and when he saw Katrina, his love for her overwhelmed him and he ran away before he could eat the whole body. So now he's stuck eating those parts, I guess.
Why was Bendix going after Crane? Because Schuler told his son-in-law that the only way for the fever in the town to break was for Bendix to sacrifice himself to the Kludde, the Old World monster in the woods. So Bendix is like, "Sure, cool, I'll totally do that." No cross-referencing this information with his mom, who's ALSO DUTCH and would know about anything called the Kludde. Just jumping headfirst into self-sacrifice like it's noble or something.
Why did Schuler tell Bendix about the Kludde? I don't even remember, as it was never elaborated enough.
So Crane gets done monologuing and Brom shows up to find Ben, and a scuffle ensues. Crane touches Brom's chest, which starts melting away the flesh and exposes Brom's heart, and Brom gets in a single slash before he falls. That single slash is somehow enough to do in Crane, a nefarious shadow being who feeds on human blood. Okay.
The very last standoff takes place ten years after Brom's death, and it's Ben v. Schuler for the title. Ben hears the Horseman calling his name and takes off into the deeper woods to find him. Surprise! Horseman is being held in some kind of suspension by Schuler, who (GASP) is actually the Kludde! What does that mean! What does he look like! Up yours, reader, Christina Henry will never tell! Like...no, seriously. We're told that he has terrible eyes, looks darker than shadows, and has giant wings. For all we know, he could be a literal fruitbat.
Naturally, a dangerous bloodthirsty cryptid from the Old World needs to monologue. He came from the Old World (we know) to pass on his legacy, and created Crane to torment the Hollow! Commence evil laughter! But Ben wouldn't let his grandfather teach him his ways--like the old man ever offered--and is down diggety to take this guy out once and for all. Because of Ben's inherited powers, the Horseman has been real all along because Ben believed that he was real.
I'm surprised Ben didn't try to revive the Horseman's power by closing his eyes, clapping, and shouting, "I do believe in Horsemen! I do believe in Horsemen!" After the fight where the Kludde is defeated somehow (?) Ben becomes the Horseman.
Listen...
Don't ask me to explain, because I don't know how that works. The system of inheritance for magic is never elaborated upon and never even brought up until this last quarter of the book. We're told to believe all of this, but the narrative never lays down rules for how magic works in this world, or even that it exists in the first place. Monster does not always equal magic. But here, we're supposed to believe that it does and then not question why exactly zero percent of it makes sense. It's more upsetting than the "magic system" in Once Upon A Time, which is basically the Fight Club of magic systems.
First rule: don't talk about the magic system.
Second rule: you do not talk about the magic system.
Third rule: someone yells "Well, hello, pretties!", waves their hand, steals an object, you can't do the same thing to get it back cuz reasons.
Fourth rule: True Love is a magic cure-all.
I'm so disappointed. Hopes were so high for this book, but it just...crashed and burned and got eaten by Ichabod Crane. Gracious me.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Blood, Grief, Gore, Murder, Acephobia/Arophobia, Deadnaming, Transphobia, Vomit, Suicidal thoughts, Sexual assault, Sexism, Death of parent, Death, Child death, Bullying, Injury/Injury detail, and Stalking
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