When I received The Hollow in the mail I nearly threw my other reading selections aside, their bookmarks noting my reality of being rather far from completion, and I happily welcomed this exciting, inviting take on an old classic.
You are greeted by obviously beautiful cover art, and a well chosen font style but then you open the rather large book to see nearly 500 pages of a much larger then necessary font.(Oh, the waste of paper!) The first chapter in about 8 pages, but it takes less then two minutes to read... it's just a little unnecessary.(Even if it's aimed at younger 'tweens' they can still read a more moderately sized type.)
Any-who, I finished The Hollow in two long, uninspired days to be left feeling entirely disappointed and with more then a few question marks looming overhead.
Abbey and Kristen have a strange obsession with their hometown, Sleepy Hollow and the famous Legend that is derived from it. Which ultimately leaves them unpopular, and painfully strange.
When Abbey meets Caspian, a dark, mysterious brooding type in the cemetery she frequents, a rather alarming crush occurs, or as we are to believe a relationship is formed. Which of course works out beautifully to help distract our misfit Abbey from the recent death of her best and only friend, Kristen.
Our heroine, Abbey is original sure, in that archetypal 'loner-girl' kind of way that is customary to these human/supernatural relationship central tales. Although I will say that her passion of creating perfumes was rather intriguing,... at first, that quickly became tired with her prolonged explanations of their individual scents and composition.
Author Tip: Don't focus so long on certain things that you cannot control. Reading a book cannot convey real scent, the attempt at creating a real sensation is nice, but not possible. Overall it becomes redundant, then frustrating.. I would love to be able to smell Kristen's very original perfume, or Caspian's that smells like delicious snicker-doodle cookies, but hey this is reality and not smell-o-vision book edition.
Which isn't to allude that I dislike description, it's just that overall I find, Verday hasn't quite grasped the most enjoyable way for the reader to really see her stories. Pages and pages focus on mundane tasks that have no real place or importance in the plot and aren't even slightly entertaining. Abbey working for her uncle, Abbey walking through her cemetery routine, Abbey cooking, Abbey making perfume, Abbey whining over her non-relationship with Caspian, Abbey whining about how much she misses Kristen....
Really, Abbey just does a lot of whining.
Not to mention, Caspian isn't very drool-worthy. He seems completely indifferent to Abbey most of the time, and by the end I find myself almost forgetting anything he's done only chapters before and even worse caring if their 'relationship' will work out.
Maybe I'm just hypercritical because it's been a few years since high school for me, maybe I've crossed over that bridge and can't really connect because that part of my life is over... but I enjoy plenty of young adult novels without feeling so completely void of any and all REAL emotion. That tends to be the best part of these types of stories, their ability to transport us all back to a different point in our lives, with sweeping emotions and stereotypical but entertaining characters and situations.
The most upsetting element of this whole thing too, the climax and resolution are thrown together so sloppily in the last few chapters it all barely makes sense. It really is a great idea, it just needed a lot more work.... and a real plot.
Oh, and I still can't find a moral to the story.
