Book Review: The Creeping by Alexandra Sirowy (reviewed by Teen Reviewer Lexi)
“If you hunt for monsters you’ll find them”
Summary:
Twelve years ago Stella and Jeanie vanished while picking strawberries. Stella returned minutes later, with no memory of what happened. Jeanie was never seen or heard from again.
Now Stella is seventeen, and she’s over it. She’s the lucky one who survived, and sure, the case is still cloaked in mystery—and it’s her small town’s ugly legacy—but Stella is focused on the coming summer. She’s got a great best friend, a hookup with an irresistibly crooked smile, and two months of beach days stretching out before her.
Then along comes a corpse, a little girl who washes up in an ancient cemetery after a mudslide, and who has red hair just like Jeanie did. Suddenly memories of that haunting day begin to return, and when Stella discovers that other red-headed girls have gone missing as well, she begins to suspect that something sinister is at work.
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And before the summer ends, Stella will learn the hard way that if you hunt for monsters, you will find them.
Lexi’s Review
This book is spooky good! The whole read had me on the edge of my seat flipping pages to see what mysterious thing would happen next.
The main thing that stood out to me about this whole wonderfully written book was the characters. There was not one character you didn’t like in some way. For me my favorite character was Sam. He seemed like a young boy with an old soul. He would be every teenage girl’s dream guy in the way he is the utmost gentleman. In the story his role is very crucial. He is the key to Stella’s character development. Stella’s character development was the main reason why this book made such an impact on me. She is relatable in the way that you can see how she struggles with being herself and being who she thinks everyone else wants her to be. Which I feel as a teen in high school this struggle is felt everyday. We want people to like us but we are afraid that people won’t like who we are and so we pretend to be something we are not. Stella portrays this struggle in such a way that I felt it was me facing the obstacles. With a best friend like Zoey, Stella felt like she had to be this certain type of girl, but as I was saying about Sam being a key in her change, he helped her realize how far she had gone from who she once was. This could also be put on the fact of having such a traumatic childhood experience. From what I read I concluded that the only reason she chose Zoey when given the ultimatum between Zoey and Sam was because she developed abandonment issues from just recently having her mother leave her and her father. Her mother is also a peculiar character in this story. Unlike most separations it was the mother who left the child and father in this story. I found this strange and it made me question if this had to play a bigger role in the book itself. What I came up with was that it gave Stella more of a reason to lean towards Zoey since she had such a strong feminine personality. But it could have just been to mix things up a bit.
I also really loved the suspense. How you weren’t sure if it was one person or another or not a person at all. Being so close to Halloween (well, like a month which is like right around the corner) this book is perfectly set. The eeriness of the killings had me paranoid after I read it. I just love when a book freaks me out like this one did.
This book had me on a rollercoaster of emotions as well. Every scene had me either laughing, crying or mentally cursing at the characters. Their actions clearly spoke of actions made by teens. You can tell their age by the writing and this is what a handful of young adult novelist seem to miss when writing their story. Teenagers aren’t adults. We don’t always think logically. We let our emotions lead us astray and we sometimes need someone to help us get back on track.
So,4 out of 5 jack-o-lanterns would recommend this book to every Halloween lover and non Halloween lover who really enjoys a good thriller.
Happy Hunting!
Published in August 2015 by Simon & Schuster. ISBN: 9781481418867
Filed under: Book Reviews
About Karen Jensen, MLS
Karen Jensen has been a Teen Services Librarian for almost 30 years. She created TLT in 2011 and is the co-editor of The Whole Library Handbook: Teen Services with Heather Booth (ALA Editions, 2014).
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