Welcome to our October series: Spooky Sundays! Here we will roundup some of our favourite Halloween/Spooky reads from all genres, newly published and some classic favourites.
Gilly Ghost Loves Scaring the Most!
Children’s Book
31 Pages
Published September 9, 2021
👻👻👻👻
Gilly Ghost Loves Scaring the Most teaches children the concept of boundaries, and how it’s important to establish and understand them. This book will be a wonderful addition to households and classrooms who are learning boundaries between friends and family.
Sometimes scaring is OK…and sometimes it’s not. Will Gilly learn the importance of boundaries with his friends? Get your copy to find out!
I really enjoyed Gilly Ghost it was a sweet story with a nice message, it had that classic kids book feel with the rhymey lyrical writing that makes it so fun to read aloud and a book kids will surely enjoy reading over and over. I loved the illustrations they were absolutely adorable.
-Jenn
The Friend
Charlie Gallagher
400 pages
Avon Press
🔪🔪🔪🔪
Dark, twisted, and hard to put down. This is a sinister tale about revenge and murder.
Two men desperate for answers. The police can’t (or won’t?) provide them. A stranger, a new friend, miraculously appears. And he has those long sought answers. But everything comes with a price. And let’s not forget how emotion, especially deeply held emotion like heartbreak and anger, can taint perception. Truth and deception can look remarkably similar.
Gallagher puts his years of experience in the criminal justice system to good use in this intriguing yet menacing game of vigilante justice. The first half of the book sets the stage of the complexity of this mystery while the second half of the book takes on the procedural element of the investigation. The first half of the book moved at a rapid pace and was full of action and suspense. While the procedural side was sound and credible, I didn’t find it as fast paced and exciting. All of the pieces in the investigation fell into place easily without much surprise and no big reveal. In the end, that didn’t matter in regards to my overall enjoyment. The complex, original plot kept me engaged.
Using this intricately crafted tale about the desire for justice, Gallagher reminds us that emotion can often overtake reason and that people are both deeply complex and flawed. I’m not sure I’ll look at a new friend quite the same after reading this story.
-Amy
The Lost Village
Camilla Sten
340 pages
Minotaur Books
😱😱😱
Creepy and atmospheric. An unsolved mystery of epic proportions and a woman engrossed with her family’s ties to it.
Sten does a magnificent job of creating the perfect ambience for this eerie abandoned town where 900 people vanished without a trace, a woman was stoned to death, and a baby miraculously survived. The uncertainty and gloom emanated from this deserted town and took on a life of its own, almost becoming another character.
The story is intricately woven through a dual narrative, as well as auxiliary letters and sermons from before the disappearance. I wish the author had taken those tools a step further and given a clearer picture of the desperation in the town that led to its belief system completely collapsing. Because of this, I found the ending to be both somewhat predictable as well as lacking substantive reasoning. However, this did not take away from my enjoyment of walking the ominous streets of the lost village.
Sten weaves a cautious tale in this mystery- beliefs built in desperation can be taken to extremes and have dire consequences.
-Amy
Leave a Reply