halogirl350's reviews
72 reviews

I don’t care how pseudohistorical or unrealistic these are - they’re fast paced and interesting with a badass female protagonist and ~romance~ <333

when will i get to live my national treasure fantasy

I had the pleasure of meeting Stacy and hearing her speak at a local Charleston event, and I must admit, I did not read the book beforehand. It’s now 2am the night after the event and I just finished flying through it because I couldn’t put it down!

There are quite a few twists in this story and though I managed to pick up on one (which made me feel like a detective), there were still more waiting to shock me. This book raises some great talking points about motherhood and the way mothers are constantly judged regardless of what they do.

The story also touches on the true crime fandom and the exploitative nature of it. I think I’d like to see a book someday where the true crime industry itself is the “bad guy.”

Reading a Grady Hendrix book while living in Charleston is just me constantly going “ooh I know where that is!”

Let’s just say my stuffed animals are sleeping on the couch tonight

if i never read another woman written by a man again it will be too soon

Where do I even start with this?

The premise is good and the blurb promising a viral witch ghost immediately piqued my interest, I am gen z after all. Unfortunately, whoever wrote the blurb only read like a quarter of the book because what is described is absolutely not the plot.

The story reeled me in anyways - the town residents simply live their lives around being haunted by a creepy witch and don’t seem to care much about her. Of course, they are all scared of her, in theory at least. Most of the residents are too young to have actually seen her do something scary or moved to town after the fact.

No one takes it too seriously when the teens set out to create something that will go viral and expose their haunting to the outside world, except it never happens. That part of the plot got shut down maybe halfway through the book and left me confused as to what would happen in the rest.

I also struggled with the writing. I understand that in translating this book from its original Dutch to English is bound to gloss over a few things that just don’t translate well, but a lot of the dialogue is just a little off. Particularly noticeable for me was the way the author failed to capture how teenagers actually talk and instead created one of those cartoons you see on Facebook made by boomers trying to show that the problem with this generation is technology. I can’t even attribute it to this being set 10 years ago either - I was a teenager on the internet in 2012 so I know what it was like.

My biggest problem was the glaring misogyny. As others have mentioned, this guy is obsessed with nipples. All the horror coming from women in this book centers around their bodies and their looks. I’m a big fan of body horror but this wasn’t even body horror - it was just women’s bodies being presented as scary (don’t even get me started on the portrayal of fat women in this book).

The writing doesn’t allow for any build up of tension because the author always ends the scene before something creepy happens with the narrator explicitly telling us that something creepy is about to happen. And the climax is spoiled by the author explaining why every thing that happens supports the thesis statement of the book that 21st century people are just as barbaric as 17th century people when there is mass hysteria, paranoia, fear, and hive-mind at work. It wasn’t difficult to pick up on that message and the explanations weren’t needed.

Overall, HEX is a pretty entertaining read and there was some solid stuff in there.