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A review by tepidgirlsummer
Hide and Seek by Sara Shepard
Did not finish book.
This installment seemed to move a lot slower than the first three. I had to skim over the last hundred pages because I have other books I'm more excited about and wanted to move on. Thayer is the most interesting part of this book and he's barely in it. WHOMP. (WOMP?)
This series isn't terrible but it isn't great, either. There's a year between the release of each book (not atypical) and every time I read the newest installment, I'm completely lost for the first 50 pages because nothing about the previous one stuck with me. All I know is there's at least one new suspect in every book and something creepy happens. It is like the literary equivalent of Lost for me: They're on the island, they're off the island; it's real, it's a dream; I can't keep track anymore so I'm done playing. Call me for the finale.
I want to like this series. I do. I loved the first eight books in the PLL series and the first three books in this series I devoured in about a day each. But this book didn't, to borrow from Karen, "blow my skirt up." It didn't even make it waft a little bit in the breeze. No, my skirt was so unmoved I may as well have been wearing pants.
I've found this is a common problem with authors who hit it big and have a high demand for their books. They start churning them out and eventually, no matter how strong their work was in the beginning, everything starts to blur together and lose momentum.
Then again, maybe it's just me. Maybe I'm getting too old for this kind of YA. Maybe I'm becoming elderly and crotchety at 25 and soon I'll be sitting on my porch in a rocking chair, drinking sour lemonade and shooting blanks at the neighborhood kids to scare them off my lawn.
Anyway, I still think it was Ethan and somehow Thayer will save Emma from him when she realizes he did it and he tries to kill her to keep her quiet, and since she and Thayer will have at some point come clean with each other and fallen in love, everything will end happily ever after (except for the whole murder and betrayal fiasco). Maybe I'll finish the series once the last book is released because I love being right. But I'm certainly not rushing to be top on the library request list for the next book.
This series isn't terrible but it isn't great, either. There's a year between the release of each book (not atypical) and every time I read the newest installment, I'm completely lost for the first 50 pages because nothing about the previous one stuck with me. All I know is there's at least one new suspect in every book and something creepy happens. It is like the literary equivalent of Lost for me: They're on the island, they're off the island; it's real, it's a dream; I can't keep track anymore so I'm done playing. Call me for the finale.
I want to like this series. I do. I loved the first eight books in the PLL series and the first three books in this series I devoured in about a day each. But this book didn't, to borrow from Karen, "blow my skirt up." It didn't even make it waft a little bit in the breeze. No, my skirt was so unmoved I may as well have been wearing pants.
I've found this is a common problem with authors who hit it big and have a high demand for their books. They start churning them out and eventually, no matter how strong their work was in the beginning, everything starts to blur together and lose momentum.
Then again, maybe it's just me. Maybe I'm getting too old for this kind of YA. Maybe I'm becoming elderly and crotchety at 25 and soon I'll be sitting on my porch in a rocking chair, drinking sour lemonade and shooting blanks at the neighborhood kids to scare them off my lawn.
Anyway, I still think it was Ethan and somehow Thayer will save Emma from him when she realizes he did it and he tries to kill her to keep her quiet, and since she and Thayer will have at some point come clean with each other and fallen in love, everything will end happily ever after (except for the whole murder and betrayal fiasco). Maybe I'll finish the series once the last book is released because I love being right. But I'm certainly not rushing to be top on the library request list for the next book.