Ink & Bone – Review – Ashes Books & Bobs

BLURB:

For as long as she can remember, twenty-year-old Finley Montgomery has been able to see into the future. She dreams about events before they occur and sees beyond the physical world, unconsciously using her power to make supernatural things happen.

But Finley can’t control these powers—and there’s only one person who can help. So Finley moves to The Hollows, a small town in upstate New York where her grandmother lives, a renowned seer who can finally teach Finley how to use her gift.

A gift that is proving to be both a blessing and a curse, as Finley lands in the middle of a dangerous investigation involving a young girl who has been missing for ten months and the police have all but given up hope.

With time running out there’s only so much Finley can do as The Hollows begins to reveal its true colors. As she digs deeper into the town and its endless layers, nothing is what it seems. But one thing is clear: The Hollows gets what it wants, no matter what.

*NOTE: This is the fifth book in the series, but it reads great as a standalone.*

Another backlist title checked off and this couldn’t have been a more perfect choice for the month of October! I was really looking forward to checking out what the town of The Hollows was like, and it lived up to everything I was hoping it would be. Lisa Unger has a great talent for making the atmosphere of her story jump off the pages as if I was a resident of this slightly strange town myself. It allowed for the perfect escape during this Halloween season.

I immensely enjoyed the gifts Finley was bestowed with in this novel as well. Ultimately, my curiosity about her talent was what kept me glued to this book. In the beginning, I was worried this novel would be too slow to keep my interest and even contemplated DNFing, but between the atmosphere and the supernatural, I decided to stick around.

The psychological elements of this story were immensely well researched and interesting to read about. This lead me to read more about Jung’s thoughts on psychic abilities and what life might be like for those with this super intuition. It’s interesting to imagine this being more than fiction!

The mindset of the characters and their internal struggles were conveyed excellently in Ink and Bone, but my biggest issue was with the action in the story. This book could have seriously benefitted from more showing and less telling. The quick action scenes needed dramatically more detail. I realized I had blank spots in my mind while reading the climax of the story because certain parts jumped around, changed perspective, or simply didn’t indicate in enough detail what was happening. Then, the whole conclusion ended up being about different characters than the ones the whole book focused on. It seemed to lack the direction that was desperately needed to wrap up the story. This made this only a so-so read for me, despite it being perfect for the season.

Rating: 3 stars

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