Ratings5
Average rating3.5
For fans of Wilder Girls comes a nightmarish debut guaranteed to keep you up through the night, about an idyllic small town poisoned by its past, and one girl who must fight the strange disease that’s slowly claiming everyone she loves. Wren owes everything she has to her hometown, Hollow’s End, a centuries-old, picture-perfect slice of America. Tourists travel miles to marvel at its miracle crops, including the shimmering, iridescent wheat of Wren’s family’s farm. At least, they did. Until five months ago. That’s when the Quicksilver blight first surfaced, poisoning the farms of Hollow’s End one by one. It began by consuming the crops, thick silver sludge bleeding from the earth. Next were the animals. Infected livestock and wild creatures staggered off into the woods by day—only to return at night, their eyes foggy white, leering from the trees. Then the blight came for the neighbors. Wren is among the last locals standing, and the blight has finally come for her, too. Now the only one she can turn to is her ex, Derek, the last person she wants to call. They haven’t spoken in months, but Wren and Derek still have one thing in common: Hollow’s End means everything to them. Only, there’s much they don’t know about their hometown and its celebrated miracle crops. And they’re about to discover that miracles aren’t free. Their ancestors have an awful lot to pay for, and Wren and Derek are the only ones left to settle old debts.
Reviews with the most likes.
Yeah, well. I did not like this based on 20%.
Now, let me start out by saying that I like Darren Shan's demon and vampire books. Why is that relevant here? Because those books are for kids, but they are absolutely brutal and can be really dark and just... Yeah. You can do that. Books for younger people can do that.
So I don't understand why this one is just so not scary. It lacks any of that and somehow not even the fact we just had a pandemic can make the whole “mysterious illness, quarantine, curfew” thing feel more like... something.
I'm also not a huge fan of first person narratives. Which is odd, because I love the Dresden Files books, where we have thousands of pages of first person. But that's because the main character has a personality. You won't necessarily love it (I do, he is a goof), but there is something. His voice is specific to him.
Here it's so unbelievable. If the author wanted to be so wordy and use every single adjective that ever existed in English (which is still just bad form), then why do it in first person? A 16-year-old girl scared by zombies is not going to freaking think about the rolling hills she is running into. That is not what sticks out to someone scared out of her mind! It killed the momentum.
Then again, the protagonist is an idiot. She jumps in front of guns because of reasons. She makes her ex boyfriend run with her into the night to find her parents, even though they know they will be fucked. She forgets to put on shoes when she goes out to the fields to work.
I especially “loved” yet another example of every woman who is practical, shoots a gun and is tough is a lesbian. Nice job.
This one was not good. It felt really amateurish in trying to connect a form (pseudo-poetic waffling) with a story that's supposedly about danger and running and fast action, while not being successful at either. Having teen characters could have been okay if they weren't just idiots.
Aaaaand I know it's going to end with the whole “we were doing such wrong things and this is our punishment by some natural thing”, which is... meh.
All in all, I didn't like it and I don't recommend it.