★★★★
It’s a book you’ve read before, long ago, and you can’t remember all the details or exactly when all the frightening thing happen, but you have a distinct premonition. And you don’t like it.
Dan and his friends have made a darling little community for themselves – everyone pitches in to grow crops, they take care of each other…and they don’t talk about the mountain.
The mountain.
It looms behind their little community and despite being hardly talked about, it is constantly on the forefront of everyone’s mind.
None of us in the town remembered anything of consequence about our lives before the horror of the mountain.
All Dan can really remember is that he had (has?) a brother who he last saw under the mountain.
He wants to go back but at the same time is horrified by what lurks beneath.
“Can’t you feel this place? It’s coming for us. Something here is coming for us.”
But now, more than ever, Dan is feeling a pull towards his brother…and to the mountain itself.
…I had no one.
But the voices never left
Overall, the concept of this one blew me away – I was hooked from the start and I could NOT put it down.
I loved teasing out what the mountain could be and the general air of mystery behind it.
When the girl came out of the mountain, and then the other girl came back from beyond – whew! I was feeling chills.
The characters for the most part felt real – though the dialogue did feel stilted at times, which caused Dan to seem far younger than his age suggested, causing a slight disconnect for me.
Towards the end I pieced together enough to figure out that the author drew inspiration from a few things and I think that’s what kept it from being a five-star book for me. If the story stood a bit more on its own and a bit less on other things, I would have absolutely fallen in love.
But all in all, this one did take me by surprise and I really enjoyed my time between these pages!
“Can you tell me what happened, Mary?”
“No,” she whispered.
With thanks to Shawn Smucker and Revell Publishing for sending me a free copy in exchange for an honest review
Interested in this one from Shawn Smucker? Buy it here: Amazon
Miranda Reads 