The Madness Underneath by Maureen Johnson

This week's review is our semi-regular guest reviewer Miss Shayne. This week she's reviewing the second title in a series; the first title of this particular series was one her Staff Picks 2015.

After reading the first book in this series, I was confused. The author left us hanging with a game changer! It was then I realized that this book is part of a series. Maureen Johnson’s cliffhanger successfully drew me back in. I had to have more.

This is the second book in the Shades of London series. With shiny new characters and a more complex plot than the first book, this book had everything the first book lacked. And I enjoyed the first book, too. After nearly being murdered, our protagonist Rory had to be taken out of school to go live with her parents and undergo some therapy. A string of shady events lead her back to school where she must try tirelessly to catch up with her classes. This is impossible though because Rory leads a bit of a double life that her “normal” friends can’t know about. Rory is an asset to a group of young adults that hunt for ill-mannered (and sometimes murderous) ghosts.

It’s hard finding a place to stop with this book. The author always has a detail at the end of a chapter that makes you want to read the next one right away. (This kept me up late at night . . .) The author also does this at the end of the book, so you want to read the next book right away.

Without giving too much away, there is another game changer at the end of this book. The ending of this book had me expressing every emotion: sadness, rage, and finally, inner peace. How could the author do this to us?! If she didn’t resolve this for us, I would never be able to read the next book. I then came up with the only ending I would accept in my head. I accurately guessed the resolution to the final problem, so I decided I would continue reading the series despite my earlier threats never to read again.

My only beef: when will everyone realize that our main character is fully capable of holding her own? The squad kind of needs her now, so just let her join your ghost sleuthing team! She has nothing better to do now anyway! You scratch her back; she’ll get rid of mean ghosts! It’s a win-win. Stop treating her like a child.

--Reviewed by Miss Shayne

Comments

How To Be A Heroine: Or What I've Learned From Reading Too Much by Samantha Ellis

I feel as if I could write a book subtitled "What I've Learned From Reading Too Much" except all my lessons would be culled from Greek mythology, the Babysitters' Club, the lives of British queens, crime mysteries, suspense thrillers and celebrity and entertainment gossip. I first ran across How To Be A Heroine by Samantha Ellis in an ad in BookPage. The title sounded intriguing and once I looked it up on Amazon, I was in for reading it. It reminds me of the literacy autobiography writing assignment that I had in one of my English composition classes in college--except this is the literacy autobiography on steroids. The premise of this book is that the author revisits the seminal texts that she read in her youth by examining the lessons and impressions of the novels that she had upon her first readings when she was younger. Ellis has then re-read the novels as an adult specifically for the writing of her own book to see if the novels hold up to her original i

Heat Lightning by John Sandford

I'd previously read John Sandford's first Virgil Flowers novel, Dark of the Moon , a few years back and found it to be a quick, well written read. Recently I discovered he has since written three more Flowers titles and decided to start with the second title and read through to the fourth and most recent one. Heat Lightning is the second Flowers installment. The darkness of the crimes committed that must be solved in the novel are leavened by the lighter presentation of Flowers and the story. It works well together--a dark crime doesn't always need dark prose to back it up. Virgil Flowers is Lucas Davenport's go to man in the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension when there's a sensitive, tough or otherwise puzzling case to solve. Flowers has a high clearance rate and can often turn around a case in about a week. This particular case is especially perplexing with quite a few red herrings thrown into the mix to throw everyone--Flowers and the reader in

The Whisperers by John Connolly

If there was one thing Jimmy didn't care for, it was competition, ... There were some exceptions to that rule: he was rumored to have a sweet deal with the Mexicans, but he wasn't about to try to reason with the Dominicans, or the Columbians, or the bikers, or even the Mohawks. If they wanted to avail themselves of his services, as they sometimes did, that was fine, but if Jimmy Jewel started questioning their right to move product he and Earle would end up tied to chairs in the [bar] with pieces of themselves scattered by their feet, assuming their feet weren't among the scattered pieces, while the bar burned down around their ears, assuming they still had ears. from page 86 The Whisperers is John Connolly's newest Charlie Parker installment in which some beloved characters reappear and in which previous characters from another Parker installment reappear to shed further light on the big baddie that may or may not be coming for Parker in the future. This newest inst

A Series Of (Un)Fortunate Reviews

Search This Blog