A review by confidenterr0r
Winterset Hollow by Jonathan Edward Durham

adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

The first quarter of the book was fantastic to me. The atmosphere and world building with the growing sense of “something isn’t quite right here” really pulled me in. That’s why I think the entire rest of the book disappointed me so much and fell flat. The 3 main characters were so very dull and dense. At first I thought it was on purpose since the
animals
are very full of personality by comparison but as the book went on…nope. They’re just dull and dense.
They’ll get major context clues that something horrible happened to the animals and they’re all just kinda like “welp. that’s wild.” and keep going. It took them until pretty late story to even fully recognize they’d been brought there against their will, like come on. I didn’t feel like any of the MCs truly acknowledged how their favorite little book was written and either continued idolizing it or just kinda…didn’t say much about it until the very end when Eamon suddenly realizes it in the final showdown with Bing for no particular reason, when he felt seemingly no remorse for the other 3 animals the whole book. By the end of the book I actually couldn’t stand Eamon with his high level plot armor and Christopher Columbus ancestry and watching him win by locking Finn in the same cage his ancestor did was infuriating. I was rooting hard for Eamon to die but that’s neither here nor there lol


I wish the entire middle of the book would’ve been cut down a bit and added more focus on the lore since that’s where the book really seemed to shine. I found the action parts became repetitive and very quickly realized
the 3 MCs were not actually in danger of dying which made that portion drag on for me. They would just run through their major injuries without much hindrance while the animals stood 5 feet away missing every shot.


I do still recommend reading this since the concept itself was unique and the storybook characters were very enjoyable and vibrant. This is definitely an Eamon hate page but I seem to be in the minority so he may not bother you as much lol. The overall story was interesting enough to deal with his mary sue-ness and where Eamon and friends fall flat the storybook characters pick up the slack (ironically).
Expand filter menu Content Warnings