Review: The Hollow by Jessica Verday

When Abbey's best friend, Kristen, vanishes at the bridge near Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, everyone else is all too quick to accept that Kristen is dead, and rumors fly that her death was no accident. Abbey goes through the motions of mourning her best friend, but privately, she refuses to believe that Kristen is really gone. Then she meets Caspian, the gorgeous and mysterious boy who shows up out of nowhere at Kristen's funeral, and who keeps reappearing in Abbey's life. Caspian clearly has secrets of his own, but he's the only person who makes Abbey feel normal again—but also special.
 
Just when Abbey starts to feel that she might survive all this, she learns a secret that makes her question everything she thought she knew about her best friend. How could Kristen have kept silent about so much? And could this secret have led to her death? As Abbey struggles to understand Kristen's betrayal, she uncovers a frightening truth that nearly unravels her, one that will challenge her emerging love for Caspian, as well as her own sanity.
 
MP3 Book
Published August 12th 2010 by Blackstone Audio, Inc. (first published August 21st 2009)
ISBN: 441752013 (ISBN13: 9781441752017)
series The Hollow #1
(Goodreads)

Review

This sounded creepy, and interesting, and scary.  But all I felt after finishing The Hollow was how deeply disappointed I was that it was what it was.  I knew this was a series going in.  And I hope that Verday didn’t make the decision to write The Hollow as an introduction to the series, that her publishers made that decision, because it’s evil, very very evil of her to do that.  And on top of being evil, it’s just boring. 

There were so many opportunities for something to happen, and nothing ever did.  The most that happened was that Abby dealt with the death of her friend, sort of, fell in love with an impossibly mysterious guy, and met some creepy old people who took care of the cemetery. 

Abby, as the main character, was horrible.  She was so mean to her parents, rude to her classmates, and really, basically, a *insert technical term for female dog here.*  I honestly couldn’t stand her.  Her parents may not have been portrayed as ideal, but they didn’t deserve the attitude she gave them—all. The. Time.  The only time she wasn’t a complete jerk to them was when they went out of their way to do something nice for her.

There are so many questions left unanswered, and so many things left unresolved, that I have to read book two.  Not necessarily because it’s so good or anything, but because I need to find out what happens next.

1 Tree: Left me with a hollow feeling, numb from disappointment.

Get to reading,

About the author

Jessica Verday is the New York Times bestselling author of The Hollow Trilogy, published by Simon & Schuster/Simon Pulse. She wrote the first draft of THE HOLLOW by hand, using thirteen spiral-bound notebooks and fifteen black pens. The first draft of THE HAUNTED took fifteen spiral-bound notebooks and twenty black pens. THE HIDDEN took too many notebooks and too many pens to count. Find out more at jessicaverday.com.