Scan barcode
A review by oashackelford
The Missing Season by Gillian French
2.0
Clara is a new kid in Pender. Her dad has a job tearing down old paper mills so he moves her family from town to town often and she has never really had friends before. The girl next door befriends her and invites her to start hanging out with her friends. Clara soon finds out that in this town kids go missing, a lot.
Two weeks before she got there a kid named Gavin Cotswold went missing, a few weeks later another girl was reported missing. The gang tells Clara that the mumbler did it. A mysterious beast that supposedly lives in the forest. Clara isn't sure she believes in the mumbler, but something is out there and it's taking kids.
***Spoilers***
I didn't like this book. I thought it started out really well laying the mystery of the Mumbler, but the Author attempted a plot twist that seemingly came out of left-field. I think that a good mystery should read a little like an Agatha Christie novel, or be like the movie The Usual Suspects. I think that executing a good plot twist means laying out little clues that the reader could potentially latch onto, then when you get to the plot twist you can go back and re-read the book and see that there were hints all along that pointed to the ending of the book but you didn't notice them.
This book laid out the idea of the Mumbler and gave the gang genuine feelings of unease but the mystery kept taking a back seat to Clara learning how to have friends or be in a relationship. The book would point to something not quite being supernatural but then move on a not really give you any clues to the killers actual identity. When the killer was finally revealed I remember thinking, "Who?" I couldn't remember the killer being anywhere else in the book besides right at the end. The ending action was a very small chapter and it felt like I had wasted my time trying to figure out who did it only to realize there was no way for me to have found out.
Based on the synopsis that I read that made me interested in the book in the first place, it made it sound like the book was going to be about a town that occasionally sacrificed it's teenagers to keep a forest god happy (like that supernatural episode with the harvest god). I was disappointed to find out that the supernatural element was fake and that there was no way for the reader to have worked out who the actual killer was. Also I stuck with the book through the first half (it was very slow) and it felt like a small betrayal that I had stayed with it only for it to end suddenly, abruptly, and without any satisfying resolution.
oh well, this one goes on my do not read again shelf.
Two weeks before she got there a kid named Gavin Cotswold went missing, a few weeks later another girl was reported missing. The gang tells Clara that the mumbler did it. A mysterious beast that supposedly lives in the forest. Clara isn't sure she believes in the mumbler, but something is out there and it's taking kids.
***Spoilers***
I didn't like this book. I thought it started out really well laying the mystery of the Mumbler, but the Author attempted a plot twist that seemingly came out of left-field. I think that a good mystery should read a little like an Agatha Christie novel, or be like the movie The Usual Suspects. I think that executing a good plot twist means laying out little clues that the reader could potentially latch onto, then when you get to the plot twist you can go back and re-read the book and see that there were hints all along that pointed to the ending of the book but you didn't notice them.
This book laid out the idea of the Mumbler and gave the gang genuine feelings of unease but the mystery kept taking a back seat to Clara learning how to have friends or be in a relationship. The book would point to something not quite being supernatural but then move on a not really give you any clues to the killers actual identity. When the killer was finally revealed I remember thinking, "Who?" I couldn't remember the killer being anywhere else in the book besides right at the end. The ending action was a very small chapter and it felt like I had wasted my time trying to figure out who did it only to realize there was no way for me to have found out.
Based on the synopsis that I read that made me interested in the book in the first place, it made it sound like the book was going to be about a town that occasionally sacrificed it's teenagers to keep a forest god happy (like that supernatural episode with the harvest god). I was disappointed to find out that the supernatural element was fake and that there was no way for the reader to have worked out who the actual killer was. Also I stuck with the book through the first half (it was very slow) and it felt like a small betrayal that I had stayed with it only for it to end suddenly, abruptly, and without any satisfying resolution.
oh well, this one goes on my do not read again shelf.