Review: Diary of a Haunting by M. Verano

First, thanks to Simon Pulse and Edelweiss for allowing me to read an e-galley of this title.  Overall, I enjoyed the book, up until the end.  I was really excited to start it, when it showed up at the bookstore where I worked a little earlier than I thought it was supposed to be released.  The cover is just so awesome!  If you haven't seen the physical copy of the book, you should go to a bookstore and check it out.  The slipcover does something really cool when you take it off. 

So, the main character is a girl named Paige.  Her parents were Hollywood royalty, a director and an actress.  But her father has done what they all seem to do, traded her mother in for a younger model/actress.  So her mother has packed up Paige and her brother Logan and moved them out Idaho.  To a big old house in a tiny little town.  They live in a beautiful setting with mountains in the distance.  When they arrive, it is winter and Paige is kind of excited to see her first snow.  But the house has issues to start with. First, when they walk in, there are these fly paper strips hanging from the ceiling in the front hallway, and they are covered with flies.  Well, Paige's mother is kind of a hippy type person, and thinks this is cruel, so they take them down and throw them out.  But soon, like the next day, there are clouds of flies in the doorway now. Even though it is winter.  Not only that, Paige sees spiders everywhere. 

The best room in the house is taken by Logan, her younger brother.  She lets him have it because of the horrible noise that she hears from it, a buzzing type of noise, that no one besides Paige seems to hear.   Now, back to the spiders.  Paige has always been extremely creeped out by them.  So her brother suggests thinking about them in a scientific manner, and when she does her journaling/blogging, she makes a point to have counted them every day. 

The new school goes great until the most popular girl's boyfriend hits on Paige, and then she is stuck with only the weird girl in school, Chloe, as her friend.  Chloe is very interested in the house and wants to know if it is haunted, because it used to be a hospital.  There are strange noises and lights in the house, a door that is sealed off, and windows on the outside that aren't open to anything.  They find out what is in the basement, and it kind of ties into the whole story, though not necessarily in a frightening way.

The whole story is told through Paige's journal/diary as the title implies.  It gets creepier and creepier as the story goes along.  Her brother gets sick, something in the house is getting to him.  And then he has trouble sleeping.  There is a scene or two with the spiders that totally gave my skin the creepy-crawlies.  But then, then comes the ending.  It builds up so good, and is so good, and then, well let's just say the ending isn't a good book ending. 

Without giving anything away, the ending is a major twist.  The type that you often see in horror movies, which up until this point, the book has been just like one, in a good way. The problem is that in movies, you're able to see flashbacks, things to help you see just what you missed as you went along. As this is a diary, from one point of view, you don't get any of these flashbacks, any way to know for sure if the twist is real, or what.  And that honestly destroyed the whole book for me.  On Goodreads I gave it a 3 star rating, because up until the end it was so good, and soo scary.  But the ending almost made me drop it to a 2.  I think you can stop around page 295, or June 16th diary entry, if you want all the ends tied up neatly, problem solved kind of ending.  If you want it to kind of end like some movies do, but still an okay open type of ending, stop on page 296, or the June 17th, 3 am entry.  After that, it just all falls apart.

Review: Ghostlight by Sonia Gensler

Thanks to Knopf Books for Young Readers and Edelweiss for allowing me to read an e-galley of this book.  I really enjoyed the other book I read by this author, The Dark Between.  While I'm still hoping for a sequel to that book, this was definitely a good standalone story.  Another kind of creepy story at parts, although really, the creepiness was almost explained away in some parts, but then when it came back into play, you knew it was real.  I also liked the background of the house that was the focus of the story.  The way it was built up, was perfect.  While you got details as the story went on, there weren't any really big info dumps that would be boring and they left just enough out to keep you intrigued and wondering, and having to read on.

The main character is a girl named Avery, I believe she is about 11 years old?  Anyway, her brother has decided he is too old for their normal summer make believe activities.  So now she is mad, but soon finds another friend to hang out with.  She and her brother are staying with her grandmother for the summer, with their mom coming to visit for a short time.  But on her grandmother's family property, there is a little cottage she rents out. This year a boy named Julian, who is a year or so older, is staying there with his father, who turns out to be a famous country music star, and his younger sister who shows up a little bit later.  There is a house on the property that Avery and her brother have been forbidden to go into.  It seems when she was younger, she'd disappeared and then been found in the house, and there was something really scary about it.  Julian likes to make movies, and so he decides he wants to make a scary movie about the house.  Partly because one night when he is out filming alone, there is a light on in the house.  Avery has to steal the key to the house from her grandmother, so that they can sneak in to film.  While there some things may happen, but Avery doesn't know if they are real, or being staged by Julian and his sister. One night things go too far.  After that Avery doesn't want to be around Julian anymore.  She's embarrassed and angry.  But it has also inspired her to find out more about the history of the house, as well as the people who lived there.  This includes interviewing an elderly, bedridden lady who used to be friends with the little girl who last lived there. 

Avery and Julian and their siblings will take the things they learn and do what they can to make the ghost in the house feel ready to move on. 

I really liked the way the story was wrapped up.  I felt the characters were pretty realistic, brothers and sisters, and grandmothers and parents.  I think this would be a great middle school level book, and will probably be recommending this to other librarians in my school district for sure.

Review: Phobic (The Forbidden Doors #1) by Cortney Pearson

First thanks to Netgalley and Victory Editing for allowing me to read an egalley of this.  I didn't get to it until just now, but I'm glad I picked it out to read.  There were some issues with the story, it wasn't perfect. But it had a lot of unique bits while also being reminiscent of other scary books and movies.

The main character is Piper.  She lives in a very weird house, doors that open into nowhere, stairs that go nowhere, it makes lots of noises and does other strange things.  But not only does she have a weird house to deal with in her life, her mother is in prison for murder, and her father has recently died.  Her brother is taking care of her, but doesn't seem to really "get" her, or really be the kind of a parent she needs.  She has a best friend named Todd. But other than Todd, the people at school are cruel to her.  She's been bullied since the day she moved there.  After her mother went to prison, her father had the house moved, the whole house.  She's lived next door to Todd since they moved, and has been best friends with him since then.  Only now he's gone out for sports and has made friends with the guys on the team and their girlfriends.  Some of the kids who have treated her the worst, really picking on her about her acne among other things. 

Things have kind of changed recently as well.  Her brother has started acting really strange, and the house has even done stranger things. When Todd tries to get Piper to be friends with his new friends, he invites them to her house for a party.  But they show up the day before, and the house seems to take note.  It seems as if at times the house protects Piper.  Even though she begins seeing ghosts, like a loop in time of a maid and the former owner of the home, as well as another servant, all somewhat a part of a strange love triangle.  But not only does the house protect Piper, if something happens to the house, she is now feeling it and getting hurt.  And then, her brother disappears. 

Piper must solve the mystery of what the ghosts want, maybe she can send them on and save her life.  Not to mention finding her brother and saving him from what could be happening to him.  She has to try to convince Todd of what is happening and that she isn't crazy.  And she has to try to do all this before the house and the ghosts in it take her life and her brother's as well.

Like I said, there were definitely some parts of the story that were familiar, but the being connected to the house to the point that if someone hit or kicked it then it felt like they'd actually done that to Piper was one unique bit I felt.  The whole back story of the house was really involved and pretty spelled out.  I liked it.  I was glad to see that the ghosts, even the good ones, might not be as perfect as you thought they were.  And I even liked the relationship between Todd and Piper, once I figured out just what he was doing.  I see there is going to be a sequel, and I will be on the look out for it in the future.