House Of Hollow By Krystal Sutherland | Book Review

Hello! I am Max and I will be manufacturing a book review for a novel christened House Of Hollow by Krystal Sutherland today! Before we head straight into the review section of this article, I would like to thank Pansing for sending an advance readers copy of this book to me!

So, without further ado, let us dive right in.

Genre: Fantasy, Horror, Mystery/thriller, YA

Synopsis:

Seventeen-year-old Iris Hollow has always been strange. Something happened to her and her two older sisters when they were children, something they can’t quite remember but that left each of them with an identical half-moon scar at the base of their throats.

Iris has spent most of her teenage years trying to avoid the weirdness that sticks to her like tar. But when her eldest sister, Grey, goes missing under suspicious circumstances, Iris learns just how weird her life can get: horned men start shadowing her, a corpse falls out of her sister’s ceiling, and ugly, impossible memories start to twist their way to the forefront of her mind.

As Iris retraces Grey’s last known footsteps and follows the increasingly bizarre trail of breadcrumbs she left behind, it becomes apparent that the only way to save her sister is to decipher the mystery of what happened to them as children.

The closer Iris gets to the truth, the closer she comes to understanding that the answer is dark and dangerous – and that Grey has been keeping a terrible secret from her for years.

Review:

This novel murdered me with its genre-twisting schemes and resuscitated me with its pacing, atmosphere, sisterhood, writing and a plethora of other wondrous essences that go along with this book. It is just an extremely well-rounded book and an absolute delight to read. I can foresee a lot of people enjoying it when this book hits the store with a wave. It is just ✨that good✨.

This book kicks off with a bang. The first paragraph of the novel instantly sucked me in and would not let me go until I finished the prologue. I was supposed to be reading other books after reading the prologue for House Of Hollow (I wanted to gauge how much I would like this book beforehand) but my friend, Elysian, urged me to drop those books and continue on with House of Hollow and seeing how enchanted I was by the sequences that occur in the prologue itself, I proceeded to read it and I inevitably succumbed to reading the whole book and wow, it was a heart-stopping ride, alright.

This novel consists of a myriad of genres. With borrowed elements from the mystery/thriller genre mix into the essence of a fantasy novel and add a sprinkle of body horror and contemporary scent into the cauldron and you will acquire this novel. It may look a little convoluted but the genres blended in immaculately and they knit into one another delicately that it does not feel messy at all.

The pacing for this book is done flawlessly. It is fast-paced since the beginning of the novel and it maintains that way until the very end of the novel. It did not once flounder or operate on a precarious filament, it expedites with a consistent speed and I absolutely adored it. With the astonishing pacing, it makes it feasible for anyone to complete this novel in one sitting and I could have finished this in one sitting but I did not because I felt the need to savour every word in this book and I am so glad I did that without a second thought.

“Some people go missing because they want to; some go missing because they’re taken. And then there are the others who go missing because they fall through a gap somewhere and can’t claw their way back.”– House Of Hollow, Krystal Sutherland.

The writing style for this novel is evocatively lyrical, eloquent and idiomatic. This novel encompasses a plethora of elegant passages that I cannot help but tabbed them with fluorescent neon page marker index tabs so that I could re-read those passages in the future and because of that, my copy of this novel is frilled with index tabs. Yes, that shows the amount of love I have for the writing in this book. With the sumptuous writing style establishes in its place, the hauntingly scathing atmosphere eventuates. The atmosphere for this novel is thick with suspense, thrills and darkness. It emanates through the pages of the novel as you go deeper into the story. It never falters; it inspissates until it engulfs you and that is definitely one of the charms of this novel. However, I wish the author did not limit herself on the fear factor of the story because I thought she should have taken an even darker route than what is presented in the book.

I adored the three sisters in this novel. Each of them has vastly disparate personalities and it is honestly refreshing to see. They are severely complex in nature and not at all one-dimensional and definitely not cupboard cutout caricatures. In this novel, we follow the perspective of Iris who is the youngest of the three sisters. She is the quiet, bright one who loves maths, geography and science and she is also the one who yearns to be unremarkable. Vivi is the middle child and she is the wild one. She sprays graffiti in bathrooms, has a lot of piercings and tattoos, and she is also a Rockstar. Grey is the eldest of the two sisters and she bursts into international stardom through modelling. She is secretive, manipulative and cruel. I loved the way the author sets up these three characters and introduces them to the readers. It lets the readers distinguish the characters with ease and not blur them together with similar characteristics like some mediocre books do. However, Cate and Tyler’s characters are not set up as well as these three. Before I get into Cate’s (the mother of the three girls) characterization, I would like to provide a quote which would help to prove my point later on:-

“They were very different women who had lived very different lives and were interested in very different things, but somehow-despite each considering the other an anomaly they usually managed to find some middle ground. They spoke on the phone at least once a month. They teased each other constantly: Cate sent Vivi links to tattoo removal clinics, Vivi sent Cate links to pictures of body modders with split tongues and their teeth filed to points, captioned Do you think this would suit me? When Vivi sent recordings of her new music, Cate responded with comments like I think you sent the wrong track? This is a recording of cats being murdered. They were silly with each other. Sweet with each other.” – House Of Hollow, Krystal Sutherland.

-the quote above shows a multitude of tender moments between Vivi and her mother – Cate. It also shows a lot of Cate’s characteristics and I craved to see more of that in the novel but the author did not reach into those part and Cate’s characterization is resolved into a worried sick mother in the end which is wholly unsatisfying, to say the least. Tyler is Grey’s boyfriend and although I enjoyed his humour and his vulnerable sessions, I did not find him to be complex or anything. He does not intrigue me as much as the others do and I wish his characterization is polished up a little to further accentuate his traits.

In conclusion, I am proffering this novel with a verdict of 90% (A+). This book is absolutely delicious and I cannot wait to see what the author has in store for us in the future!

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This is the end of my review for House Of Hollow By Krystal Sutherland! I hope you all enjoyed it and follow me with your email/Wordpress account to get notifications when I post a new article! Bye!