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A review by kristiealexis
It Will Just Be Us by Jo Kaplan
dark
sad
tense
2.0
The biggest issue with this book is the overworked purple prose, which reviews elsewhere have gone into. I also found the occasional use of second person jarring.
I'm also pretty sure the author is not familiar with the location she was writing in. Aside from the Maroons, there wasn't anything that rang true about the setting and sense of place is very important to me. Zero acknowledgement that the most rural part of the Great Dismal Swamp (on the west side) is still 15 minutes from a city of 100K and a popular pass-through for Virginia Beach. And on the east side you're like 15 minutes from Chesapeake/Norfolk and 400K people. So the rural comments kept making me roll my eyes. I also refuse to believe that the house wouldn't be swarmed with ghost hunters since the swamp is touted as the most haunted place in VA and ghost tourism is a thing there.
No mention of the wildlife refuge. Randomly brought up coal mines (in the Tidewater... bitch, where??) but not the absurd number of peanut farms. And so on. And I'm not even from there!
This is probably small for most people, but atmosphere and place is very important for me in a haunting book.
Also I'm not a huge sucker for totally downer endings, but I will say I don't think this one was executed poorly.
I'm also pretty sure the author is not familiar with the location she was writing in. Aside from the Maroons, there wasn't anything that rang true about the setting and sense of place is very important to me. Zero acknowledgement that the most rural part of the Great Dismal Swamp (on the west side) is still 15 minutes from a city of 100K and a popular pass-through for Virginia Beach. And on the east side you're like 15 minutes from Chesapeake/Norfolk and 400K people. So the rural comments kept making me roll my eyes. I also refuse to believe that the house wouldn't be swarmed with ghost hunters since the swamp is touted as the most haunted place in VA and ghost tourism is a thing there.
No mention of the wildlife refuge. Randomly brought up coal mines (in the Tidewater... bitch, where??) but not the absurd number of peanut farms. And so on. And I'm not even from there!
This is probably small for most people, but atmosphere and place is very important for me in a haunting book.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal cruelty