The synopsis for Imaginary Friend by Stephen Chbosky immediately caught my attention as a spooky, gripping, and intriguing story. It follows Christopher, a seven year old boy who goes missing for six days and emerges from the Mission State woods, seemingly unharmed. But something, or someone, is telling him he needs to build a tree house before Christmas, or everyone in the town of Millbrook is going to die. This little bit had me so ready for a spooky horror story, and since it's September, it seemed like the perfect timing. The audiobook is a little over 19 hours on 1.25 speed from Libro.fm, which seemed like a good pace to me. I was bummed that I didn't absolutely love this story, but it was an interesting and thought provoking story, so I would say it was worth the listen.

First off, based off of what the main kid group did and talked about, I kept having to remind myself that they were 7 years old. To me, they should have at least been 12. I'm sorry but I know that Christopher got super smarts from "The Nice Man", but how do 7 year olds build a tree house by themselves with actual windows, a door, and roofing? It just didn't seem at all plausible to me. Which I know the others also started getting smart as well the more time they spent in the woods, but it still didn't make any sense to me. And there are way too many times the steps to the tree house were described "like baby teeth" to the point I started getting really annoyed. There were other phrases that kept getting repeated throughout the story as well, and it just kind of felt a little lazy. I don't know if that was to bring back the whole age thing of the kids, where they aren't able to describe things in more than one way, but with everything else in the story going on that they were wayyyy too young to know or do it didn't fit. There was also a constant mention of the song "Blue Moon" which I also didn't understand the significance of. Maybe I'm just missing something not being a very religious person myself....?

I don't want to give any in depth thoughts currently since this won't be released until October 1st, and the parts in the above paragraph really doesn't give much away, it was just the things throughout that I personally got annoyed with. And if I can get away with telling you what those things were without giving away major spoilers, I think that it's important to share, and I think that they really aren't big things in the first place. I could only give this three stars for more reasons, but again, not going in depth over it yet. Was it a good read? Yeah! I would recommend it if you're looking for something that has some truly horrifying imagery, twists and turns, and an interesting take on religion. There were more things I liked than disliked, but it did seem like it was probably about 200 pages worth more than it needed to be to be a more powerful story. I will say that I was constantly looking forward to coming to work every day so that I could see what happened next, as that is my main listening time for audiobooks. I personally would probably recommend this on audiobook from Libro.fm because the reader does a good job with her different voices for the characters, she's good at pacing, and from other reviews I've read this is over 700 pages in print. 0_0 which to me, is intimidating :P

Look for this one October 1st, and get into Christopher's world that turns completely on it's head into another dimension.