Customer Reviews

The sins of Rachel Ellis

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I read this book when I was 9 yrs old and and 25 years later it still has the ability to lure me in. I'm not sure why some of the other reviews state that it's not so great of a read the second time around, or once they've gotten older. I guess I'm still a kid at heart, but I do love a good fantasy, mystery. It's a great read and one of my all time favorites.

This book came into my possession as part of a lot of horror/thriller paperbacks I found on eBay. I'd never heard of it before and started reading it with misgivings, because it's not the kind of book that would normally appeal to me. But as one reviewer wrote, it almost immediately lured me in and then kept me coming back to find out what happened next. I think it's a wonderfully written book, full of lush description that has the ability to make your skin crawl. The characters are believable, the setting dark and ominous, and the storyline moves along at a good clip. Plus the dark romantic elements are surprisingly effective. What's not to like?

The only thing I didn't like about the book was the surprise ending. I found it very disturbing. But I've been thinking about it ever since I finished the book last night, so maybe that's the point!

I highly recommend this book, and I am not a young adult. In fact, I'm off now to find out if Philip Caveney has written any other books. A sequel would be interesting....

I don't understand a few of the prior reviews. They liked it as an adolescent and read it over and over again but only ranked it 2 stars? I also read it in my early teens, and as an adult I scoured bookstores until I was able to find it. Still as enjoyable in my 20's and 30's as it was back then. Not too many books can boast that!

Ok, this book is not very good in comparison to, say, Shakespeare, but I read it over and over years ago when I was an adolescent. It's entertainment on the level of a good soap opera with appropriate amounts of scandal and sin. Fun, entertaining, and entirely seedy, and I'm positive Philip Caveney, the author, knew exactly what he was writing. I recommend it for anyone with a few bored hours. It's a page-turner on the same level of cheap horror, and I have to say the story intrigued me enough years later to search for and buy a copy. It was my first guilty pleasure, and it hasn't let me down as an adult when I need a break from the heavy stuff.

I, too, read this book as a young teen & was very captivated by it. It has just enough sex & romance in it to keep the pages turning...as well as the horror element, of course. I recently pulled it out again & found it not nearly as good as I'd recalled (poorly written in some aspects, actually) but still fun read & the end does have a surprising twist that I had forgotten. Overall, worth whiling away a few hours. Ideal airport or travel readig.

I read this story for the first time as a teenager (30 years ago) and remembered that I really liked it so I recently bought a copy to reread.

It would have been a good story if not for the fact that the heroine was a 12 year old oversexed child. Obviously that didn't bother me as a teen, and I had completely forgotten about that, but as an adult I find it disturbing that the main character has sex with a full grown man.

I work at a maximum security prison that houses a lot of pedophiles so perhaps that's one reason this aspect of the story totally creeps me out. Even so I can't help but wonder what the author was thinking when he wrote it? I don't understand how he could ascribe the feelings he does in the story to a 12 year old girl. I certainly wasn't looking at grown men, when I was 12 years old, and thinking about them sexually.

Another reason this bothers me is that I know that pedophiles would be turned on by the 12 year old in this story. I've actually read, in their prisoner files, the excuse that it was the "child's" fault that the pedophile committed a sex act with them. Puleez! They would like us to believe that the child wanted to have sex with them and apparently the author of this story expects us to believe the same thing.

I realize that this book is just a work of fiction but it's too close to the same "fiction" that the pedophiles I work with would have me believing if they could.