I'll be honest, I was expecting more. This book didn't have the lyrical/poetic descriptions I love best in my horror (see: The Luminous Dead, Rules for Vanishing, The Hollow Places, Annihilation, What Big Teeth, etc). There's also a hyper focus on the Hollow sisters' very conventional (tall, skinny, pale, blonde, angular) standards of beauty.
When we hit the halfway point (aka when we get to the point where everything gets real) that's when I finally engaged. But again, without the lush descriptions (Sutherland seemed to reuse the same set of adjectives and descriptions, relying really heavily on the smell of decay to do the work for her), I wasn't 100% sold on the creep factor.
It also feels like we did Vivi dirty by the end. She fades into the background in a way that doesn't fit her character at all. We also never seemed to understand Gray, even though she should have been closer to the center.
When we hit the halfway point (aka when we get to the point where everything gets real) that's when I finally engaged. But again, without the lush descriptions (Sutherland seemed to reuse the same set of adjectives and descriptions, relying really heavily on the smell of decay to do the work for her), I wasn't 100% sold on the creep factor.
It also feels like we did Vivi dirty by the end. She fades into the background in a way that doesn't fit her character at all. We also never seemed to understand Gray, even though she should have been closer to the center.