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lurieta 's review for:
Empty Smiles
by Katherine Arden
This book and the first book in this series, Small Spaces, were my favorite.
In this final book in the series, Ollie has been imprisoned by the Smiling Man on his traveling carnival train in exchange for him saving her father's life in the previous book. He feeds her and entertains her, but he is still his sinister, scary self.
Coco, Bryan and Phil are waiting for a sign of Ollie and from the Smiling Man who told them they would have a chance to win Ollie Back. In the meantime, children are disappearing from a local carnival and creepy clowns are terrorizing the town.
This book really solidifies the found family between Ollie, Bryan and Coco, and how surviving trauma can bond them and help them build trust with one another forever. The monsters in this book were particularly creepy and sinister to me. One of the really effective scares in all of the books in this series is how the Smiling Man as villain makes the kids hypervigilant and distrustful of their own realities.
My only complaint about this book is that the ending felt like a mad rush to the conclusion, but hinted at Ollie's curiosity, despite all he had done, about the Smiling Man, his origins, his lore and his loneliness. I wish that had been explored more in this book.
In this final book in the series, Ollie has been imprisoned by the Smiling Man on his traveling carnival train in exchange for him saving her father's life in the previous book. He feeds her and entertains her, but he is still his sinister, scary self.
Coco, Bryan and Phil are waiting for a sign of Ollie and from the Smiling Man who told them they would have a chance to win Ollie Back. In the meantime, children are disappearing from a local carnival and creepy clowns are terrorizing the town.
This book really solidifies the found family between Ollie, Bryan and Coco, and how surviving trauma can bond them and help them build trust with one another forever. The monsters in this book were particularly creepy and sinister to me. One of the really effective scares in all of the books in this series is how the Smiling Man as villain makes the kids hypervigilant and distrustful of their own realities.
My only complaint about this book is that the ending felt like a mad rush to the conclusion, but hinted at Ollie's curiosity, despite all he had done, about the Smiling Man, his origins, his lore and his loneliness. I wish that had been explored more in this book.