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These are reviews originally posted to Amazon as customer reviews. They're intended for entertainment and informational purposes only. (Apologies for any typos, bad grammar, or offensive language.) This isn't sponsored by Amazon or represent them in any way, although they do have a very nice site and I recommend checking it out for your next book purchase. Feel free to comment on the books if you've read them or tell me how much my reviews suck or whatever.
That is all.

Thursday, December 8, 2011

The House on the Corner

The House on the Corner
by Andrew Leon
(3/5 stars)

This starts off like the stereotypical haunted house story.  The Howard family (Air Force master sergeant Will, his wife Claire, 12-year-old Tom, 10-year-old Sam, and 6-year-old Ruth) move from Denver to Shreveport, Louisiana.  The house they move into is old and spooky-looking with a lot of flaking paint, dusty, and overly large rooms.  Some of those rooms have strange things in them.  Oh, and the house's last inhabitants disappeared.

So through 40% of the book I kept waiting for there to be the bumps in the night and such that you would expect in a haunted house story.  But then the book does a 180 from that and becomes more like "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe."  There becomes a lot of talk about fairies, Guardians, Towers, wizards, and a magic sword.  Which is a little surprising because there are so many Star Wars references.

The book gets much more interesting once that stuff comes into play.  Unfortunately at that point there's only 60% off.  I think the author bit off more than he could chew at that point.  It made for a rushed ending that wasn't extremely satisfying to me.

Also, the book is in dire need of a real editor.  A lot of typos.  Also, I'm not fond of authors who use the word "suddenly" a lot.

There are still a lot of good things about this book.  The first-person narration between Tom, Sam, and Ruth is a little confusing at first but gets easier as it goes on.  I liked the kids, especially Sam and Ruth.  The relationship between the kids was well-drawn.  And once the book really gets going it's hard to put down--or shut off the Kindle.

That is all.

1 comment:

Andrew Leon said...

I appreciate the review! I didn't really think it would be your sort of thing, but I'm glad you read it. And I'm glad you had a hard time putting it down toward the end.

Other than the spacing issues (especially with the commas), I haven't found any other typos, but I'll keep looking. I'm not sure how the spaces with the commas got in there unless it was something in the formatting process, because they were not there in the previous incarnation.