Currently reading
Scares were hinted at, but never really delivered.
The back of this book bears a stamp that suggests this title, while shelved in the YA section, is perhaps intended for those fourteen and up, but it doesn’t read fantastically for that age group in this reviewer’s opinion.
This is around the age when most readers start to read more critically, when they are less likely to take excuses and suspend their disbelief limitlessly. This is when they begin notice an overabundance of coincidences and conveniences just to keep the plot going, and this book certainly had plenty of those.
The stamp also suggests a certain amount of scare, which the story kept hinting at, but never quite got around to delivering.
This story follows seventeen-year-olds Emma and Jem, and Jem’s fourteen-year-old sister, Shell.
They haven’t seen each other for seven years, since Emma’s spine was crushed in an accident in the cellar of the Waterwitch, since the last time Emma was able to walk without assistance and massive amounts of pain, since her parents moved her far away from the place that had brought their family nothing but bad luck.
Emma is brought back to town by an unwell relative and told that, under no circumstances, is she to stay in that cursed and now abandoned inn. She makes an attempt to obey, at least, and stays at the inn across the road, but is soon lured back into the old, and rumoured to be haunted, Waterwitch by her childhood friends who are hiding out there after running away from their drunk and abusive father.
The rest of this review can be found HERE!
2