Scan barcode
toriedawn1's review against another edition
3.0
The ending pulled this book up a star, throughout most of the book I felt confused at what was going on, I understand that psychological thrillers can often acchieve this but I personally didn't feel particularly "thrilled" the ending was enjoyable though. The book was getting 2 stars before the last few chapters. If you are into horror give it a go, its not all that long and you may get more out of it than I did.
pn_hinton's review against another edition
2.0
Before now the only book I had ever read by this author was The Mall which I loved as a teenager. And even when I read it recently as an adult, there was still that touch of nostalgia there, even as I rolled my eyes at all the teenage tropes. And there were quite a few. There may be slight spoilers ahead so read at your own risk although to be fair the book has been out since 1990.
Enter Kate, a would be horror writer who goes to camp and meets not one, not two, but THREE guys who seem to have the hots for her even though one is a grumpy bear about showing it. I mean, apparently the love triangle (or in this case square) in YA has been around longer than I remember but I personally found it exhausting and I can see why now there is such an outcry in the world for platonic love. On her first outing with Gideon they kiss. Her encounter with Pearce by the cave and the bear trap she initiates the kiss which was weird to me because he had been a Grade A jerk to her thus far in the A The book played with the fact that Denzil might be a platonic friend but alas more kissy times happened at the end.
I will admit the mystery of who was behind the attacks was engaging and then the reveals were a bit shocking. But then it got to the final 'twist' and I looked at my phone (as I was reading it on the Hoopla app) and was like “Are you freaking kidding me?”
And it's not even that I'm reading it as an adult that made me groan. Teen Me would have been taken aback. I may not have been as enraged as Adult Me is but I wouldn't have been happy. And the reason was that it seemed like it was phoned in. At least with other stories with this twist you can go back or remember and see the signs. This one? Seemed to come completely out of nowhere and was just thrown in I guess for a shock value? But it seemed weak and honestly the villain being the way it as originally presented would have been better.
That 'twist' is what dropped the book to a two-star because up until then it rain pretty much on course for a teen horror from that time. But that wasn't a good one even by the standards of those days. I did not have said nostalgia for this book so I read it a bit more critically than I did The Mall, even though it's the same 1990's Point Horror teenage genre. All that said, for me at least, it wasn't great The Mall even with all of its problematic threads and there are quite a few.
I'm also sad that Tawney was actually that dumb. :(
Enter Kate, a would be horror writer who goes to camp and meets not one, not two, but THREE guys who seem to have the hots for her even though one is a grumpy bear about showing it. I mean, apparently the love triangle (or in this case square) in YA has been around longer than I remember but I personally found it exhausting and I can see why now there is such an outcry in the world for platonic love. On her first outing with Gideon they kiss. Her encounter with Pearce by the cave and the bear trap she initiates the kiss which was weird to me because he had been a Grade A jerk to her thus far in the A The book played with the fact that Denzil might be a platonic friend but alas more kissy times happened at the end.
I will admit the mystery of who was behind the attacks was engaging and then the reveals were a bit shocking. But then it got to the final 'twist' and I looked at my phone (as I was reading it on the Hoopla app) and was like “Are you freaking kidding me?”
And it's not even that I'm reading it as an adult that made me groan. Teen Me would have been taken aback. I may not have been as enraged as Adult Me is but I wouldn't have been happy. And the reason was that it seemed like it was phoned in. At least with other stories with this twist you can go back or remember and see the signs. This one? Seemed to come completely out of nowhere and was just thrown in I guess for a shock value? But it seemed weak and honestly the villain being the way it as originally presented would have been better.
That 'twist' is what dropped the book to a two-star because up until then it rain pretty much on course for a teen horror from that time. But that wasn't a good one even by the standards of those days. I did not have said nostalgia for this book so I read it a bit more critically than I did The Mall, even though it's the same 1990's Point Horror teenage genre. All that said, for me at least, it wasn't great The Mall even with all of its problematic threads and there are quite a few.
I'm also sad that Tawney was actually that dumb. :(
ndiganci's review against another edition
2.0
I would give this 2.5 on pure nostalgia alone, but I ended up giving it 2.
I first read this when the YA horror genre was just coming into vogue: all the R.L. Stine Fear Street books, and Christopher Pike, and Cusick were the rage when I was in high school. I remembered this being one of my favorites out of the bunch, along with Pike's Remember Me and Weekend. Feeling nostalgic - and wanting a quick read - I sought this one out. Wooo boy. Let me tell you, aging 20 years will definitely give a new perspective on this book.
Kate is a (I assume) high school student going to a writer's retreat with her creative writing teacher. It's at a camp in the middle of the woods (point here for being in a location prone to creepiness) with classes taught by writing instructors. I assume the only things they teach here are romance and horror - because that's all the classes we hear about: Kate for horror and her teacher for romance. For someone given a retreat to hone her craft, Kate really doesn't go to any classes. She really only seems to go to 2, and it's during the first one that she's singled out by the teacher, Gideon Drewe. He, of course, is dazzled by her beauty at first glance. Problem 1: she's, what, 17? His age is never stated, but he "looks young," so I'm assuming at least mid-20s, especially since he's been published quite often and travels a lot (for work, I assume. There's a lot of assumptions going on in this book). And - of COURSE - Kate is already a brilliant writer. Which, ok, some people have a natural talent, but this just adds to Kate's Mary Sueness. She's beautiful, caught the eye of the teacher, AND is a talented writer. But the point is, we have an at least 25-year-old man becoming infatuated with a high schooler. It happens, but it doesn't make it less icky.
From here, we meet the other main characters: Pearce, the tall/dark/handsome/troubled/mysterious/oh-so-bad-boy caretaker of the camp that is owned by Gideon and his brother William; Denzil, an 18-year-old who also works at the camp, who immediately takes Kate under his wing; and his sidekick, the sweet but quite dim Tawney. Kate's teacher suffers an extreme case of poison ivy and is shipped off to the hospital quite early, so she's out of the way. I enjoyed Denzil and Tawney's characters best out of the crew, but they still seemed to fall flat from what I remembered.
And since this is YA, we of course have the love triangle. Or quadrangle. I'm not entirely sure. Kate falls in love with Gideon, Gideon falls in love with her. Pearce admits being attracted to Kate, and even though Pearce gave Kate the heebie-jeebies at first, NATURALLY she starts developing feelings for him, especially after a nasty accident causes bodily harm to Pearce (because who can't help falling in love with a man who's just had his foot almost torn off by a bear trap??). And Denzil falls in love with Kate. Kate kisses Gideon, Gideon kisses Kate. Kate kisses Pearce (while he's practically bleeding out), who kisses her in return. Kate kisses Denzil, Denzil kisses her. Really, I was waiting for Tawney and Kate to kiss. She kisses half the camp, and this retreat is only a couple of days long!
So anyway, the plot happens. Someone is out to get Kate because she's caught the eye of Gideon. Starts leaving threatening messages, cuts up her clothes while she and Tawney are swimming, destroys her belongings in her cabin and sacrifices an animal in her shower, and later sets her cabin on fire. She finds a hand in a glove in the woods. She also runs across a mysterious woman in the woods near the Drewe house, but Gideon shrugs this off as one of his brother's weirdo friends.
But then later we find out there was a third Drewe sibling, Gideon's twin Rowena, who was a wee bit off her rocker, tried to kill William but ended up being caught in the fire, and died. No one's really recovered from her death. William, of course, hasn't been seen in weeks but is assumed to be off on another bender somewhere. Tortured writers, amiright? Gideon starts acting strangely, Kate gets drawn more and more to him, Rowena may or may not actually be alive. Turns out, Pearce has been playing as Rowena all this time. He set the fire to kill William to free Rowena, didn't realize she had been locked in William's room and died as a result. This made him go mad, end up in some weird split personality situation where he BECOMES Rowena, sees Gideon and Pearce falling in love with Kate, and sets out to destroy the one trying to take her place.
It was a convoluted mess with flat characters. Kate is the annoying Mary Sue: everything happens to her; she doesn't take action on anything. Dissolves into tears (which, I guess I can understand. She came to a retreat without a thought that she'd be singled out with someone trying to kill her). But she just moves with the story instead of moving the story. She really doesn't do anything to improve her situation, just makes it worse by kissing everyone she meets.
And the ending: after Pearce is caught, Gideon makes a comment that the doctors said his delusion has gone on for quite some time. Excuse me - we're a couple hours, maybe, from his being caught? What doctors? If this was known, WHY was he still allowed to run the camp? Why wasn't he in a hospital somewhere? And where were the cops? A cabin's been set on fire, there's no fire trucks there, William's been chopped up into pieces and strewn about the camp, and Kate's just allowed to get on the train and head home. You'd think she'd be questioned about the events and her part in all them, but it just seems like no one cares about what happened. The Drewes aren't rich enough to buy off the police. How are they going to explain William's disappearance?
Sometimes things that you loved in childhood should just be left there so you don't spoil the illusion. This was definitely one of them.
I first read this when the YA horror genre was just coming into vogue: all the R.L. Stine Fear Street books, and Christopher Pike, and Cusick were the rage when I was in high school. I remembered this being one of my favorites out of the bunch, along with Pike's Remember Me and Weekend. Feeling nostalgic - and wanting a quick read - I sought this one out. Wooo boy. Let me tell you, aging 20 years will definitely give a new perspective on this book.
Kate is a (I assume) high school student going to a writer's retreat with her creative writing teacher. It's at a camp in the middle of the woods (point here for being in a location prone to creepiness) with classes taught by writing instructors. I assume the only things they teach here are romance and horror - because that's all the classes we hear about: Kate for horror and her teacher for romance. For someone given a retreat to hone her craft, Kate really doesn't go to any classes. She really only seems to go to 2, and it's during the first one that she's singled out by the teacher, Gideon Drewe. He, of course, is dazzled by her beauty at first glance. Problem 1: she's, what, 17? His age is never stated, but he "looks young," so I'm assuming at least mid-20s, especially since he's been published quite often and travels a lot (for work, I assume. There's a lot of assumptions going on in this book). And - of COURSE - Kate is already a brilliant writer. Which, ok, some people have a natural talent, but this just adds to Kate's Mary Sueness. She's beautiful, caught the eye of the teacher, AND is a talented writer. But the point is, we have an at least 25-year-old man becoming infatuated with a high schooler. It happens, but it doesn't make it less icky.
From here, we meet the other main characters: Pearce, the tall/dark/handsome/troubled/mysterious/oh-so-bad-boy caretaker of the camp that is owned by Gideon and his brother William; Denzil, an 18-year-old who also works at the camp, who immediately takes Kate under his wing; and his sidekick, the sweet but quite dim Tawney. Kate's teacher suffers an extreme case of poison ivy and is shipped off to the hospital quite early, so she's out of the way. I enjoyed Denzil and Tawney's characters best out of the crew, but they still seemed to fall flat from what I remembered.
And since this is YA, we of course have the love triangle. Or quadrangle. I'm not entirely sure. Kate falls in love with Gideon, Gideon falls in love with her. Pearce admits being attracted to Kate, and even though Pearce gave Kate the heebie-jeebies at first, NATURALLY she starts developing feelings for him, especially after a nasty accident causes bodily harm to Pearce (because who can't help falling in love with a man who's just had his foot almost torn off by a bear trap??). And Denzil falls in love with Kate. Kate kisses Gideon, Gideon kisses Kate. Kate kisses Pearce (while he's practically bleeding out), who kisses her in return. Kate kisses Denzil, Denzil kisses her. Really, I was waiting for Tawney and Kate to kiss. She kisses half the camp, and this retreat is only a couple of days long!
So anyway, the plot happens. Someone is out to get Kate because she's caught the eye of Gideon. Starts leaving threatening messages, cuts up her clothes while she and Tawney are swimming, destroys her belongings in her cabin and sacrifices an animal in her shower, and later sets her cabin on fire. She finds a hand in a glove in the woods. She also runs across a mysterious woman in the woods near the Drewe house, but Gideon shrugs this off as one of his brother's weirdo friends.
But then later we find out there was a third Drewe sibling, Gideon's twin Rowena, who was a wee bit off her rocker, tried to kill William but ended up being caught in the fire, and died. No one's really recovered from her death. William, of course, hasn't been seen in weeks but is assumed to be off on another bender somewhere. Tortured writers, amiright? Gideon starts acting strangely, Kate gets drawn more and more to him, Rowena may or may not actually be alive. Turns out, Pearce has been playing as Rowena all this time. He set the fire to kill William to free Rowena, didn't realize she had been locked in William's room and died as a result. This made him go mad, end up in some weird split personality situation where he BECOMES Rowena, sees Gideon and Pearce falling in love with Kate, and sets out to destroy the one trying to take her place.
It was a convoluted mess with flat characters. Kate is the annoying Mary Sue: everything happens to her; she doesn't take action on anything. Dissolves into tears (which, I guess I can understand. She came to a retreat without a thought that she'd be singled out with someone trying to kill her). But she just moves with the story instead of moving the story. She really doesn't do anything to improve her situation, just makes it worse by kissing everyone she meets.
And the ending: after Pearce is caught, Gideon makes a comment that the doctors said his delusion has gone on for quite some time. Excuse me - we're a couple hours, maybe, from his being caught? What doctors? If this was known, WHY was he still allowed to run the camp? Why wasn't he in a hospital somewhere? And where were the cops? A cabin's been set on fire, there's no fire trucks there, William's been chopped up into pieces and strewn about the camp, and Kate's just allowed to get on the train and head home. You'd think she'd be questioned about the events and her part in all them, but it just seems like no one cares about what happened. The Drewes aren't rich enough to buy off the police. How are they going to explain William's disappearance?
Sometimes things that you loved in childhood should just be left there so you don't spoil the illusion. This was definitely one of them.
laurelinwonder's review against another edition
3.0
Short and Perhaps too quick
A quick read, but maybe not long enough to be satisfying. I liked the voice Cusick created, but but it wasn't for me.
A quick read, but maybe not long enough to be satisfying. I liked the voice Cusick created, but but it wasn't for me.
ntharpta1's review against another edition
2.0
WTF did I just read? I had this book as a kid but wow! Reading it again as an adult, I am horrified and not in the intended way.
obscurefangirl's review against another edition
4.0
This is the first book I read that got me into Romance and it was that touching teen romance with a homocidal killer in the mix. I still have a pretty beat up copy of this ..well the first 7 pages have fallen out and I've just got them sitting in the rest of it with the cover sitting on top. Awesome book.
saydenie's review against another edition
3.0
My absolute favorite book as a teenager.
I’ve been really feeling a need for 90s nostalgia lately, due to the stress of the word. It was really fun to revisit this book. It’s definitely dated, but I can remember what I loved about it as a teenager. YA horror has come a long way.
I’ve been really feeling a need for 90s nostalgia lately, due to the stress of the word. It was really fun to revisit this book. It’s definitely dated, but I can remember what I loved about it as a teenager. YA horror has come a long way.