Reviews with content warning for Death of parent - Horrid

Reviews tagging 'Death of parent'

Horrid by Katrina Leno

56 reviews

angeldevoursliterature's review against another edition

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dark mysterious sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

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yessenyan's review against another edition

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funny slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

A repetitive book with lots of wasted potential inevitably ending with a disappointing and underwhelming finale. It was laughable and entertaining at best.

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leexpen's review against another edition

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dark emotional mysterious sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

📝 SYNOPSIS:
Struggling with all-consuming rage, Jane North-Robinson feels chilled by more than just the autumn air when she and her mother move to her mother's childhood home, where Jane must dig up her mother's secrets to understand what is happening.
🏚📚🌹🎒🪦👻👩‍👧🎃😭

👍🏻 RECOMMENDATION:
💛 READ IF you've got nothing else, if it works for a reading challenge, etc.

💬 FAVORITE QUOTES:
• Pg. 201

do books taste like roses?

• Pg. 209-210 (TR: Mental illness, depression)

A flash of the earth with everything destroyed except this house, the last building standing, and Jane within it, trapped inside its walls, not really caring anymore whether she made it out or not.

• Pg. 214 (TR: Mental illness, compulsive behaviors)

She imagined the words dissolving off the paper and sinking into her bloodstream. She imagined her body filled with words. Made up of them. Words instead of blood, words instead of organs.

👓 FORMAT:
📖

📑 COMMENTS:
• The main characters are complex and flawed. Jane's friends are heartwarming and supportive.
• Jane is frustrating slow to figure out what happened, leaping to illogical conclusions for the sake of continuing the mystery.
• I mostly agree with the Booklist quote on the back, which reads, "Leno blends Agatha Christie and Shirley Jackson for a narrative that ranges from unsettling to genuinely terrifying." (I did not find the narrative terrifying but otherwise agree.)
• The book starts a little too slow, and it ends a little too quickly, but the middle is well-paced.
• Race is poorly represented. Some of the characters seem like they were originally intended to be POCs but were changed to white or the author used POC aesthetics. The black characters are black only in description of skin tone.

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kaleighmadden's review against another edition

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dark mysterious reflective tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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quercine's review against another edition

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dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Incredibly unique style and really vivid writing. The setting, atmosphere, and emotions are all very richly detailed, and once things got going I couldn’t stop reading. There are lots of layers to symbolism and metaphors, as well as to the relationships between characters.

The ending was unexpected and shocking, and left me sort of just staring into the middle distance for a while. I hated it as the conclusion for characters I had grown to love but loved it as a piece of writing.

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alibrareads's review

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dark mysterious tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? N/A
Loveable characters? N/A
Diverse cast of characters? N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A

4.5

She couldn’t remember the first book she had eaten.

That’s one of the best/most interesting opening sentences I’ve ever read, honestly. My least favorite aspect is the trope of the mom being frustratingly uncommunicative/purposefully hiding information from the main character. The phrase “secret de Polichinelle” (aka open secret) is brought up in this book, and it plays a big role in the tension throughout it, but it also caused a bit of frustration on my part (just as it did to Jane).

Phew, that ending! I’ve read that some people felt it was too fast and abrupt, but I felt like the snowballing at the end was paced perfectly and it ended delightfully ominously. The last 50-ish pages did feel fast in relation to the first 250-ish pages, granted. This was a pretty slow build-up to the reveals, and there was a good amount of slice-of-life. Aside from the creepy parts, this book was primarily about grief and loss and how it affects people, and coping mechanisms. It was really sad actually. And the writing was simple but evoked a wide range of emotions really well.

Jane is an unreliable character, occasionally losing time and unsure if what she is seeing is real or not, but in my opinion there are real supernatural elements to this and not just vibes/seeing things!

There are a couple things from the climax that aren’t addressed

like how Ruth doesn’t wake up from Melanie and Jane’s loud conversation, what happens with Jeff and Jane’s journal that Melanie apparently handed to him before he left

, but they’re also just whatever, didn’t really matter or affect my enjoyment of it! I flew through this and thought it had very decent spook levels. An excellent contemporary gothic YA horror in my opinion!

YouTube: https://youtu.be/mpw2uHd2d2o

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