One of the reasons I let myself get behind in book reviews (which apparently runs in the family) is that some books are so very meh — not terrible but also really not worth talking about — that I avoid reviewing them. And then weeks and months go by, and I have even less to say but now I have tons of good books I wanna talk about (read The Collector series by Dot Hutchison!) so I’m buckling down folks.
I read these two books back to back in April and basically came away with, wow teenage girls are terrible. Also, these reviews are spoiler-y (the second more than the first).
Little Monsters by Kara Thomas
“But the night doesn’t like to give up its secrets. And if Bailey disappeared into it, there might be no telling what happened to her.”
Kacey is the new girl in Broken Falls — she leaves the craziness of life with her mother to live with her father and his new wife and kids. The youngest, Kacey’s half-sister, adores her. Kacey makes friends — Bailey and Jade — and they include her in all their events. Everyone is just so NICE (spoiler alert: none of them are nice, they are evil teenage girls). Kacey sneaks out one night to hang out at a (haunted) barn with Bailey and Jade, and her sister (I cannot remember the sister’s name, let’s call her Skipper) tags along despite Kacey’s protestations. And then 2 nights later, Kacey’s friends are no longer speaking to her, Bailey disappears, and Skipper starts seeing the “Red Woman” visiting her at night.
The Red Woman legend was vaguely entertaining — supposedly a local woman haunts the barn and the woods after her family was slaughtered — and Skipper believes in it so wholeheartedly that I began to wonder if some supernatural element was actually going to be introduced. But in the end, it’s basically teenage girls being awful to each other, and…meh.
The Forgotten Hours by Katrin Schumann
This book made me mad. The entire plot centrals around a grown man sexually assaulting a teenage girl, and her best friend in the whole wide world completely not believing her. The “twist” is that the disbelieving best friend is the daughter of the rapist. She sides with her father, a decade goes by, and THEN she decides to maybe re-examine things?
“Everything we choose to do has consequences. And people do not change unless they want to change. They show us their colors; we just don’t see them.”
I’m simplifying a lot, of course, but that’s the basic gist of it. Honestly, what really bothered me wasn’t so much that the teenage girl sided with her dad — I can’t imagine how I would think or react if my father were accused of such a thing — but that we have to listen to her defend him over and over before she finally maybe possibly thinks her friend (Lulu) was telling the truth. Katie decides to look into it right when her father is being released from jail — she goes back to the lake community where it all happened to get his house ready for him. She starts prodding around the past, and discovers that wait a second — her father is a creep. And he is a BIG DAMN CREEP. The stuff she uncovers made my skin crawl.
And Lulu, the actual victim, gets so little in the way of character development. She’s this gorgeous, free spirited teenage girl — all curly hair and lipstick– and then disappears after the trial. The book isn’t ABOUT her — it’s about Katie. I don’t know y’all — maybe this book just stressed me out because the subject is so awful that I wasn’t going to like it no matter what. But it is awfully hard to root for a single person in this novel.