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paperbackd 's review for:
The Hollow
by Jessica Verday
I went into The Hollow hoping for a rich, atmospheric ghost story. Instead, what I got was yet another unoriginal, badly-written 500 page insight into every thought and feeling that runs through the mind of an infatuated high school girl dealing with her first crush. And although it was obvious from the beginning that The Hollow was a paranormal romance, Verday waited until there were only 50 pages left before the “surprise”… and then abruptly left the reader hanging with plenty of plot-holes and absolutely no explanations. It seems as though Verday was trying to create a modern slow-paced gothic romance. Usually I’d devour such a novel, but Verday’s writing style left something to be desired and I found myself rolling my eyes as cliché after cliché made an appearance.
Verday’s two leads, Abbey and – wait for it – Caspian – tick just about all the boxes on the Mary Sue/Gary Stu Litmus test. Caspian acts like a flatter, less appealing clone of every other romantic lead in YA paranormal romance these days. Abbey gained my sympathy at first, but quickly lost it when she went from bereaved best friend to dim-witted ghost whisperer. Even then, she seemed to have no personality other than her perfume-making skills, and despite her good grades she was painfully blind to everything going on around her. In fact, before the big reveal, nothing supernatural even crosses her mind, despite the fact that she’s supposedly obsessed with the town’s gothic legend.
The ending aggravated me most of all, because so many things were revealed but left unexplained. Silly little things. Like, And that brings me to another problem I had with Abbey. When Caspian tells her that a stripe of his hair magically turned black after a near-death incident, she accepts this explanation without giving it another thought. Um… why? And when the same guy watches her from afar in a cemetery and then suddenly appears in her dead best friend’s basement… she doesn’t find that odd at all? If I were Abbey I would be running for the hills screaming “ghost” two pages in. But instead, we get pages and pages of awkward, painfully stilted conversation between them. Despite the beautifully gothic setting and Verday’s obvious attempt to appeal to the Twilight audience, there’s absolutely no chemistry between the two leads.
The secondary plotlines are no better. We have all the usual clichés. Bitchy cheerleaders; an unsociable girl driven even further down the social ladder with the demise of her best friend; a new overfriendly friend giving our heroine long lingering looks every time she walks by... there’s the obligatory prom scene, too. Every American YA novel written post-Twilight needs a prom scene, right? It’s pretty much mandatory.
I’ve ranted on long enough. I’ve given The Hollow 1.5 stars because I think Verday could redeem herself with the next book. I’ll read it, because I want to know if my questions are answered. But I’m not holding out much hope for it.
Verday’s two leads, Abbey and – wait for it – Caspian – tick just about all the boxes on the Mary Sue/Gary Stu Litmus test. Caspian acts like a flatter, less appealing clone of every other romantic lead in YA paranormal romance these days. Abbey gained my sympathy at first, but quickly lost it when she went from bereaved best friend to dim-witted ghost whisperer. Even then, she seemed to have no personality other than her perfume-making skills, and despite her good grades she was painfully blind to everything going on around her. In fact, before the big reveal, nothing supernatural even crosses her mind, despite the fact that she’s supposedly obsessed with the town’s gothic legend.
The ending aggravated me most of all, because so many things were revealed but left unexplained. Silly little things. Like,
Spoiler
how could Nikolas and Katy make tea and knit scarves for Abbey if they were dead? And if the black streak in Caspian’s hair is what marks him out as a shade, why did he have it when he was still alive?The secondary plotlines are no better. We have all the usual clichés. Bitchy cheerleaders; an unsociable girl driven even further down the social ladder with the demise of her best friend; a new overfriendly friend giving our heroine long lingering looks every time she walks by... there’s the obligatory prom scene, too. Every American YA novel written post-Twilight needs a prom scene, right? It’s pretty much mandatory.
I’ve ranted on long enough. I’ve given The Hollow 1.5 stars because I think Verday could redeem herself with the next book. I’ll read it, because I want to know if my questions are answered. But I’m not holding out much hope for it.