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inkhearted 's review for:
Witherwood Reform School
by Obert Skye
I do not want to be too harsh here, but even if a book is the first in a trilogy or a series, I do think the reader is owed a little something to start with, and I really have to say that we are given precious little to go on here. Charlotte and Tobias live with their widowed father, who is more than a little out of his depth raising two spirited older children. When a prank on their terrible nanny goes badly awry, their harried father plans to scare them straight by pretending to ditch them. Unfortunately, disaster intervenes and the two clueless children find themselves actually abandoned in the middle of nowhere, with no other place to seek refuge at the mysterious and somewhat sinister school that is situated there. Unfortunately for them, getting out of Witherwood proves a much bigger challenge than getting in.
There is a premise here, but it does not seem to ever get off the ground. It feels like it is all just laying groundwork for the rest of the series, which is a tough hand to deal a reader, in my opinion. Most of the characters in book one are still so sketchily depicted that it is hard to have much feeling about them, including (unfortunately) Charlotte and Tobias, who are not even really differentiated from each other all that much. The mystery of Witherwood in this case might actually be a little too much of a mystery at this point. Outside of the fact that they are basically imprisoned there, we are given such little detail about the school and the surrounding grounds, that there really isn't enough of a hook to invest readers outside of the obvious family-divided plotline. Style-wise, the book strikes an interesting note--somewhere between Lemony Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events and the Books of the Beginning series, which might be promising, but a book needs to hang a hat on something more than just quirkiness alone. I read an ARC--I have to hope that if the final version doesn't see much changes, that the author plays fair and makes good on his promises by giving us something much meater in the sequels, now that the setup is all in place.
There is a premise here, but it does not seem to ever get off the ground. It feels like it is all just laying groundwork for the rest of the series, which is a tough hand to deal a reader, in my opinion. Most of the characters in book one are still so sketchily depicted that it is hard to have much feeling about them, including (unfortunately) Charlotte and Tobias, who are not even really differentiated from each other all that much. The mystery of Witherwood in this case might actually be a little too much of a mystery at this point. Outside of the fact that they are basically imprisoned there, we are given such little detail about the school and the surrounding grounds, that there really isn't enough of a hook to invest readers outside of the obvious family-divided plotline. Style-wise, the book strikes an interesting note--somewhere between Lemony Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events and the Books of the Beginning series, which might be promising, but a book needs to hang a hat on something more than just quirkiness alone. I read an ARC--I have to hope that if the final version doesn't see much changes, that the author plays fair and makes good on his promises by giving us something much meater in the sequels, now that the setup is all in place.