Reviews

The Whispering Dark by Kelly Andrew

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chloffeejelly's review against another edition

adventurous dark funny mysterious tense fast-paced

4.75

it had all the elements i love in a book! the paranormal creepiness, the dark academia, ghosts, mysteries, etc. I think it's hard to pull off a story where both the main character and the reader are kept in the dark and i think this is probably one of the few times it worked soooo well. bc even tho i was confused at times it was the kind of confusing that fed the intrigue and my curiosity. i loved the subtle foreshadowing of delaney commanding colton without her knowledge. i wouldn't have minded a couple of extra chapters to explain a bit more in depth what exactly happened but over all i loved this book! tbh the only thing that is stopping me from giving this a 5 stars is the g-slur towards the end.

sarhau4's review against another edition

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dark mysterious slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix

3.0

I don’t usually read spooky books, but we picked this for book club for spooky season and it wasn’t bad. I did feel like it was a bit hard to follow at times, but in the end I think I mostly got it. It was interesting, but not totally my cup of tea. Also, I felt at times that certain characters’ reactions to things were a bit unrealistic.

tulilipz's review against another edition

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dark mysterious tense medium-paced

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

4.0

faeriesparks's review against another edition

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dark emotional mysterious tense medium-paced

4.0

upchurchka's review against another edition

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3.0

The book is about a dead girl Delaney who gets admitted to a special school who can portal between dimensions including hell. She meets a boy she saved from a pond and they solve the mystery of why men keep dying because they wanted to be immortal but couldn't handle the creature. The apostle the head of the school ends up dying and she ends up survivng g because of Colton.

bassmanvoh's review against another edition

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1.0

Popsugar Reading Challenge 2024: Prompt Nine - "A book by a deaf or hard-of-hearing author"

Weird. Weird. Weird.

Those were the only thoughts that kept going through my head throughout this unnecessarily long, drawn-out, and boring read. I didn’t mind the writing at first, but then realized that the author didn’t know how to use different similes or descriptive terms for ANYTHING happening in this novel.

If you can count on more than two fingers in an entire story where the author says, “She let out a breath she didn’t realize she was holding” or something along those lines, we have a problem.

On the actual story side of it all, I was just hoping until the very end that the magic system in the world was explained. The ideas of how the magic in the world intertwines with other things, for example, the characters going to a school to learn how to use the magic they have, are very good. It’s a familiar fantasy trope that the Harry Potter nerd inside me is most definitely looking for in a YA-ish fantasy read, but I was unfortunately let down. I have no clue about any of it. This leads to the next point that I was also hoping for: an explanation of why people were who they were. These surface-level characters were making some weird choices due to the people they were connected to, but nothing was explained about why they were connected to them or who they were before they were connected to them, except for the reasoning of “magic.”

I don't want to spoil too much for anyone who happens to see this and still wants to read, but there is a massive lack of connecting some dots that left me feeling a bit unsatisfied.