Escaping into My Books

I got this book on Net galley. Reading the description, I realized that it is not a genre I tend to read much of: Horror/suspense type books. I tend to stick to Science Fiction, Romance, Fantasy, and General fiction. Not a big horror fan. But the cover was really pretty and the description was good enough to pull my interest, so I gave it a try. When I write these I try not to give spoilers especially for books where thing are revealed to the reader at a certain pace and I feel like they should experience themselves without me spoiling it. So I will not give too much away.

I would say that the book grabbed me right from the start and for the first hundred pages or so, I was hooked. It starts off very dark...with the death, or really the murder, of a small child. But that "murder, who committed it, and the circumstances around it are what kicks off the events of the book, and from there it keeps this atmosphere of this building dread and mystery.

Kenna our protagonist has an extremely scary and dangerous power and her whole life, she has been told to suppress it and never use it. But an attack on her family leads to her using this power and the results are catastrophic, and that leads to her being sent to live with an estranged family member, on what she always viewed as a weird, hippie like commune outside of town. But she soon finds she has more questions than answers about her special ability and who she is during her stay there, than she had before.  At the commune she finds an escape from the darkness and guilt she carries, she immerses herself in her power and how good it makes her feel, (which was a new thing for her, since her power only made her feel fear and guilt before) she is on a constant high learning and feeling accepted as she had never been before. But eventually she realizes that the commune is not all that it pretends to be, and her power, that she was only just beginning to enjoy and accept, was even more dangerous that she thought and could be used to manipulate her. From the start it is established that Kenna, is not really the ideal heroine, and she is not perfect. She makes mistakes, she's petty, and she’s deliberately blind to what she doesn't want to see. She is young, and thinks she understands the world better than anyone…basically like any other typical teenager. And the story basically came down to her having to choose who she wanted to be in life. If she was going to face her issues sober and in the light of day, or run away and hide, living in some dream world. But as demonstrated...choosing to live in ignorance also has a steep price. And reality, no matter how much it hurts, might be the better choice.

I would say the book did a good job of keeping my interest, despite me not liking horror. But it did slow down in the middle a bit when Kenna was at the commune. There was a lot of time spent talking about her using her power and the drug like effects they had on her mind and moods, and dancing in the moonlight with other commune members. I think we could have done a bit less with those scenes…and more spent on building the mystery up of the commune and it's secrets. That I think could have been paced a bit better. And the felt the ending...and the fates of the members of the commune was a bit too open ended. I would like liked to have seen a bit more of what happened to the members once they came down from their high and fully realized what they did, what their actions resulting in, the pain they caused to live in that dream world for so long. Yes, this was Kenna's story, but I would have liked to have seen more of a resolution there.

All in all this was a good read. Kept my interest. Was a bit scary, which I hate, but it was interesting enough to keep me reading.