A magic dark & bright

“A woman haunted the woods behind my house. I used to watch her from my bedroom window. She glowed silver in the moonlight, a pale wraith in a white dress that curled around her ankles and twisted in an ancient wind that didn't touch the pine trees around her.”

This book starts out very eerie and creepy. From there, I continued to be intrigued and into the story enough that I could not wait to finish and see what was really going on in the small town of Asylum. The cover of this book can be slightly misleading, this is a ghost story and it is a lot creepier than the cover would have to believe, but I still think the cover is pretty. This book comes out April 28th and is a great ghost story with great characters.

As for the characters in the book, we mostly follow Amelia, Charlie, and Leah. Amelia is dealing with a lot in her life between seeing ghosts, losing her brother, and her father leaving all in the span of a year. Then you get the mysterious teenage girls dying in the town after Charlie appears. Charlie is the mysterious grandson of the town “witch” who also happens to be Amelia's neighbor. Charlie comes at the beginning of the summer and immediately there is a connection with Amelia. While I found it slightly cliche and predictable, I did like how the relationship between Charlie and Amelia progresses. Charlie is seen as this all-around good guy. The characters in this book were well developed and each one had their own background story that we slowly learned.

I also really enjoyed the writing in this book. Jenny Adams Perinovic has a very unique style that kept me entertained and wanting to read as fast as I could to find out what was going to happen next. I can also say that she is cruel with that ending. Now I'm going to have to wait over a year to find out what happens next.

As for the setting of this story, this was the best part of the book. Asylum is this small town with a lot of history surrounding it. I loved the jokes about a small town that come out at the beginning when Charlie first comes to town. My favorite was definitely: “‘You know what they say about small towns,” I teased. “Low on crime.” “And big on secrets,” he said.” You can also tell that a lot of thought and research went into constructing the world and town of this book.

This book was a great start to what I know is a series, I just do not know how many books we can expect. This was a paranormal mystery. This book had ghosts, mysterious deaths, magic, and secrets that all wove into this story that I really enjoyed.


I received a galley of this book through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review