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rjdenney's review against another edition
2.0
Book Thoughts coming soon... or not. I love R.L. Stine but this was pretty bad.
mehsi's review against another edition
2.0
Well this was a disappointment. :(
Claire was really bleh to the end, a whiny spoiled little brat.
The deaths were just lame and comical (to be expected though).
The story felt a bit dragged, I sometimes just skimmed pages because nothing happened except for Claire and her whining.
Claire was really bleh to the end, a whiny spoiled little brat.
The deaths were just lame and comical (to be expected though).
The story felt a bit dragged, I sometimes just skimmed pages because nothing happened except for Claire and her whining.
ansley_amore's review against another edition
adventurous
funny
lighthearted
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? N/A
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
alexandrabree's review against another edition
3.0
I wish that you could rate books out of ten or use half stars because this was about a 3.5 or a 6/10. When I picked it up I knew I was going to binge read this book and finish it in a day. This was about a two hour read for me, I found that the romance in the story was a little flat, even for a YA it would have been better if Jake had liked only Annalee and if Delia had liked an entirely different guy. Although I do understand he was trying to parallel? Mock? a midsummer nights dream and so il let it slide. I have to say I would have enjoyed reading Shakespear much more in school if i had read this book first
nickimonkey's review against another edition
2.25
It felt like it would be good but repetitive wording, generic names for people (dude, slut), the boy obsessed fmc made it almost intolerable
beastreader's review against another edition
2.0
Claire’s father is a movie producer. He has finally agreed to allow Claire and her friend Delia to be in one of his movies. The movie is really a fresh start on a horror movie that was never finished in the 1960’s. The reason…three of the actors were murdered while filming the movie.
To make things interesting Claire’s love interest, Jake will also be at the movie studio. Too bad he has eyes for Delia, who in turn has eyes for Jake’s friend, Shawn.
I can remember reading R.L. Stine books. I guess you could say they helped give me a brief look into horror books but without all of the gore. Plus the books did not give me nightmares. I can even remember watching the television show based on the books. So when I saw Mr. Stine had come out with a new book, I wanted to check it out, especially since it was aimed at an older audience and it was a horror book.
Well I can tell you that I was sorely disappointed in this book. I expected so much more from Mr. Stine. The characters were not that interesting and there was no surprises. The story read as if the characters were reading off the rough draft of a script for a “D” horror movie with no name actors who can not act, really bad writing, no real plot, and after reading this book if you stick with it that long will have you saying “WTF”. Kind of like a sci-fi television movie.
To make things interesting Claire’s love interest, Jake will also be at the movie studio. Too bad he has eyes for Delia, who in turn has eyes for Jake’s friend, Shawn.
I can remember reading R.L. Stine books. I guess you could say they helped give me a brief look into horror books but without all of the gore. Plus the books did not give me nightmares. I can even remember watching the television show based on the books. So when I saw Mr. Stine had come out with a new book, I wanted to check it out, especially since it was aimed at an older audience and it was a horror book.
Well I can tell you that I was sorely disappointed in this book. I expected so much more from Mr. Stine. The characters were not that interesting and there was no surprises. The story read as if the characters were reading off the rough draft of a script for a “D” horror movie with no name actors who can not act, really bad writing, no real plot, and after reading this book if you stick with it that long will have you saying “WTF”. Kind of like a sci-fi television movie.
eliyamos's review against another edition
mysterious
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
2.0
fishgirl182's review against another edition
1.0
Got up to page 26 but just wasn't feeling it. Picked this up at the library out of nostalgia as I used to love Fear Street as a kid. The opening of this was creepy if a bit over the top. I should power on and read more before giving up but I don't think I'm going to like this and will probably cut my losses early. I'd rather keep my fond memories of Stine and the scary stories that I grew up on.
OK now I've made it up to page 70 and I still have no idea where this book is going. The first few thrilling chapters are followed by a bunch of inane teen chatter and awesome lines like "Darlene sighed. I sighed. It was a sighing party." :( However, Puck has just made an appearance. I am guessing this is the Shakespeare connection? I'm not very well versed in a Midsummer Night's Dream so I don't know how similar this is to the original play so far. Thinking not very since so far all we right now is a triple murder and some mopey teens. Let's see if I can get through more tomorrow before I throw in the towel.
Ok I could not take it and started skimming ahead. Now I'm near the end where the main character decides it's a good idea to break into the haunted mansion where someone just died as some kind of party game. Wow this is bad.
Now comes the exciting conclusion where the true villain in revealed and he takes a moment to sit the kids down to tell them why he's going to murder them all.
I just finished and wow. I am not even sure what to say. The characters were super annoying and shallow and the whole murder mystery was completely unbelievable. Dialogue was stilted. I am also unsure of how this ties into a Midsummer Night's Dream except for the fact that there's a character named Puck in it.
Extremely disappointing book from one of my favorite authors as a teen. I say skip it unless you're just curious or have a masochistic streak.
OK now I've made it up to page 70 and I still have no idea where this book is going. The first few thrilling chapters are followed by a bunch of inane teen chatter and awesome lines like "Darlene sighed. I sighed. It was a sighing party." :( However, Puck has just made an appearance. I am guessing this is the Shakespeare connection? I'm not very well versed in a Midsummer Night's Dream so I don't know how similar this is to the original play so far. Thinking not very since so far all we right now is a triple murder and some mopey teens. Let's see if I can get through more tomorrow before I throw in the towel.
Ok I could not take it and started skimming ahead. Now I'm near the end where the main character decides it's a good idea to break into the haunted mansion where someone just died as some kind of party game. Wow this is bad.
Now comes the exciting conclusion where the true villain in revealed and he takes a moment to sit the kids down to tell them why he's going to murder them all.
I just finished and wow. I am not even sure what to say. The characters were super annoying and shallow and the whole murder mystery was completely unbelievable. Dialogue was stilted. I am also unsure of how this ties into a Midsummer Night's Dream except for the fact that there's a character named Puck in it.
Extremely disappointing book from one of my favorite authors as a teen. I say skip it unless you're just curious or have a masochistic streak.
weweresotired's review against another edition
1.0
See more reviews at The Best Books Ever!
Y'all, the only way I'm going to get through this review is with the help of Lucille Bluth. Because only she has the annoyed facial expressions that sum up my feelings after finishing this book.
Yeah, that's right. I should have just DNFed this book but you know how you reach that point where a book's like a train wreck that you can't look away from, and also you're not really reading anything else at the moment so you might as well push through? That was me.
But, let's back up for a minute.
Readers of a certain age (coughcough) will remember author R.L. Stine's Goosebumps series from back in the day. I was addicted to these books, and later, the TV series. I don't remember them being particularly well-written, but I was a kid and I found them to be creepy and so I devoured them relentlessly.
When I saw that Stine had a new YA book coming out, I was intrigued. The cover art was creepy, the merging of Shakespeare with a modern day movie studio setting seemed interesting, and darn it if I'm not a sucker for a good horror story.
This was not a good horror story. Not even close.
Here, in list form, are the things that drove me absolutely up a wall with this book.
*Have you ever read a horror story where you're kind of willing the main characters to die? Yeah. That's how this book is. I hated all of them and their stupid boy problems and their stupid nonsense decisions.
*Look, I'm not super familiar with A Midsummer Night's Dream but I know that this is not a retelling; the only thing it has in common is a subplot involving love potions and a character named Puckerman, who I guess is supposed to correlate to Puck in the source text, only he doesn't at all and instead is intended to be super creepy, and, spoiler, the villain. (A reviewer on Goodreads called him "a particularly lecherous version of Danny DeVito", which is so on the nose that I can't even try to top it.)
*Claire, our main character and narrator, breaks the fourth wall the entire time! Her narration constantly addresses questions and comments to the reader. This would make sense if the book was positioned as a diary or report, but it isn't.
*Claire and Delia, her best friend, are tooootally in looooove with their guy friends but surprise the guys don't like them back and instead of accepting this and just being friends with them, they instead decide to go the creepy non-consensual route and dose them with love potions, because that has proven to work over time and I know I'd totally feel good about myself if I knew deep down the guy I was with only loved me because I drugged him; tl;dr I am 1000000% over love potion/spell plots because they're gross.
*After seeing numerous traumatic events, Claire and Delia cope by eating. Which is fine. I cope with a lot of crap by feeding my face. Sort of. Except that they're seeing people murdered in front of them and their reaction is "meh" and "but what about the moooovie we're in" and "CUPCAKES" and then they move on to worrying about their boy problems. People deal with trauma in different ways but this just felt inappropriate.
*Also, the amount of shaming of characters was unreal. Any scene of Claire and Delia eating is accompanied by a lot of body shaming. The girls also relentlessly shame another character for being a "slut", which we are to guess is true by the fact that she wears skimpy clothes and flirts with boys a lot? Despite the fact that our main characters basically do the same thing? But they're our main characters so we should like them?
*The movie studio is allegedly in trouble but they keep emphasizing time and time again that there's another presumably successful comedy film being shot at the same time as Stupid Murder Mansion 2000 or whatever it's called. Either your horror movie is the studio's last gasp, or it isn't. Also, no one involved in this book seems to have any idea what it's like to work on a movie set. Neither do I, but I'm pretty sure they film for more than like five minutes at a time. There's no mention of any filming except for when they're filming scenes that, spoiler, results in deaths. You don't need to show them, that would be boring, but no one even acknowledges that there's anything else to film.
*There's just no consistency or follow-up. Claire is excited about being on the movie. Claire has some kind of paranormal sensing abilities. Claire doesn't feel like there's anything janky going on. Claire is terrified of the movie set. Claire isn't terrified of the movie set. This wasn't a realistic "teenager changing her mind" thing, this was just bad writing.
*To add insult to injury, it wasn't scary. It was predictable and laughable and I think even as a middle grade reader I would not have found this scary one bit. Stine's simplistic, formulaic writing might work for younger readers, but YA has gotten progressively more sophisticated over the years, and Stine's style hasn't grown with it.
I don't like to tell people not to bother with books. I generally think that most books have merits, and can recognize that a book just wasn't for me. But there's always an exception to the rule, and I think this book is it.
If any of the things I mentioned above bother you, then just don't bother with this book.
Y'all, the only way I'm going to get through this review is with the help of Lucille Bluth. Because only she has the annoyed facial expressions that sum up my feelings after finishing this book.
Yeah, that's right. I should have just DNFed this book but you know how you reach that point where a book's like a train wreck that you can't look away from, and also you're not really reading anything else at the moment so you might as well push through? That was me.
But, let's back up for a minute.
Readers of a certain age (coughcough) will remember author R.L. Stine's Goosebumps series from back in the day. I was addicted to these books, and later, the TV series. I don't remember them being particularly well-written, but I was a kid and I found them to be creepy and so I devoured them relentlessly.
When I saw that Stine had a new YA book coming out, I was intrigued. The cover art was creepy, the merging of Shakespeare with a modern day movie studio setting seemed interesting, and darn it if I'm not a sucker for a good horror story.
This was not a good horror story. Not even close.
Here, in list form, are the things that drove me absolutely up a wall with this book.
*Have you ever read a horror story where you're kind of willing the main characters to die? Yeah. That's how this book is. I hated all of them and their stupid boy problems and their stupid nonsense decisions.
*Look, I'm not super familiar with A Midsummer Night's Dream but I know that this is not a retelling; the only thing it has in common is a subplot involving love potions and a character named Puckerman, who I guess is supposed to correlate to Puck in the source text, only he doesn't at all and instead is intended to be super creepy, and, spoiler, the villain. (A reviewer on Goodreads called him "a particularly lecherous version of Danny DeVito", which is so on the nose that I can't even try to top it.)
*Claire, our main character and narrator, breaks the fourth wall the entire time! Her narration constantly addresses questions and comments to the reader. This would make sense if the book was positioned as a diary or report, but it isn't.
*Claire and Delia, her best friend, are tooootally in looooove with their guy friends but surprise the guys don't like them back and instead of accepting this and just being friends with them, they instead decide to go the creepy non-consensual route and dose them with love potions, because that has proven to work over time and I know I'd totally feel good about myself if I knew deep down the guy I was with only loved me because I drugged him; tl;dr I am 1000000% over love potion/spell plots because they're gross.
*After seeing numerous traumatic events, Claire and Delia cope by eating. Which is fine. I cope with a lot of crap by feeding my face. Sort of. Except that they're seeing people murdered in front of them and their reaction is "meh" and "but what about the moooovie we're in" and "CUPCAKES" and then they move on to worrying about their boy problems. People deal with trauma in different ways but this just felt inappropriate.
*Also, the amount of shaming of characters was unreal. Any scene of Claire and Delia eating is accompanied by a lot of body shaming. The girls also relentlessly shame another character for being a "slut", which we are to guess is true by the fact that she wears skimpy clothes and flirts with boys a lot? Despite the fact that our main characters basically do the same thing? But they're our main characters so we should like them?
*The movie studio is allegedly in trouble but they keep emphasizing time and time again that there's another presumably successful comedy film being shot at the same time as Stupid Murder Mansion 2000 or whatever it's called. Either your horror movie is the studio's last gasp, or it isn't. Also, no one involved in this book seems to have any idea what it's like to work on a movie set. Neither do I, but I'm pretty sure they film for more than like five minutes at a time. There's no mention of any filming except for when they're filming scenes that, spoiler, results in deaths. You don't need to show them, that would be boring, but no one even acknowledges that there's anything else to film.
*There's just no consistency or follow-up. Claire is excited about being on the movie. Claire has some kind of paranormal sensing abilities. Claire doesn't feel like there's anything janky going on. Claire is terrified of the movie set. Claire isn't terrified of the movie set. This wasn't a realistic "teenager changing her mind" thing, this was just bad writing.
*To add insult to injury, it wasn't scary. It was predictable and laughable and I think even as a middle grade reader I would not have found this scary one bit. Stine's simplistic, formulaic writing might work for younger readers, but YA has gotten progressively more sophisticated over the years, and Stine's style hasn't grown with it.
I don't like to tell people not to bother with books. I generally think that most books have merits, and can recognize that a book just wasn't for me. But there's always an exception to the rule, and I think this book is it.
If any of the things I mentioned above bother you, then just don't bother with this book.