Review for There's Someone Inside Your House by Stephanie Perkins!
Quick View Review
Overall Rating: **** (4/5)
Goodreads Rating: *** (3.54/5)
One Sentence Review: A super fun and delightfully cheesy horror story (I swear it’s not the oxymoron you think it is), this book had me racing to finish and had me addicted from start to finish.
Full Review:
Scream meets YA in this hotly-anticipated new novel from the bestselling author of Anna and the French Kiss. One-by-one, the students of Osborne High are dying in a series of gruesome murders, each with increasing and grotesque flair. As the terror grows closer and the hunt intensifies for the killer, the dark secrets among them must finally be confronted. International bestselling author Stephanie Perkins returns with a fresh take on the classic teen slasher story that’s fun, quick-witted, and completely impossible to put down. (Summary from Goodreads)
Ok so friendly PSA: I am not a horror person. Like at all. I’m extremely squeamish and can’t watch even the least scary of horror movies, so forgive me if I’m super knowledgeable about horror and/or thrillers. So this book, believe it or not, actually reminded me a lot of Stephanie’s previous books. Of course, the plots were as different as you can get (TSIYH obviously had some much higher stakes for the characters), but the writing felt just as light-hearted and fun as it did in Anna & the French Kiss. That being said, Stephanie’s writing really made it so that the scare factor throughout the story was almost nonexistent. Yes, the suspense was constantly hanging over my head; and yes, obviously I was dying to know who the killer was…But I wasn’t terrified of what was going to happen to the characters nor was I at all that disgusted by the gory descriptions of the killings. So if I had to take a guess, if you’re at all a fan or connoisseur of horror movies/books, this story likely won’t appeal to you. Despite what might become the popular opinion of this book, though, I personally very much enjoyed it. It was fast-paced, quick, and so much fun. I loved that I was racing to the end, dying to know who the killer was and how the rest of the story would play out. There’s just something about the way Stephanie Perkins tells stories that draws me in and always makes me invested in the characters and their endings. The plot was nonstop. I’m not going to talk much about it because I did a feels forecast (in which I talk about the general “weather” of the emotions you’re likely to go through as you read the book) in one of my recent YA book news reports on YouTube, so if you want to hear about it, head to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP4bS... and watch from 2:49-3:27. In terms of characters, I fell in love with them all. Ollie was perfection, Makani was perfection… EVERYONE was perfection. They were so effortlessly realistic and complex and I really felt like they could at any moment just jump off the page and exist in real life. The only bad thing I can say about this book is that the end was soooo anticlimactic. I was so looking forward to the whirlwind climax and the unpredictable ending, yet what I got was a kind of flat and uneventful finish. BUT I felt like the excitement of the rest of the book more than made up for it. Overall, this book was more or less what I expected it be: a super quick and addicting read that was suspenseful and incredibly entertaining. If you’re a fan of Stephanie’s other books then I would highly recommend picking this one up even if you think horror isn’t for you… because it’s definitely not for me, yet I absolutely loved this story. Thank you to PenguinTeen for sending me an ARC of this book! P.S. I did a completely spoiler-free video detailing my suspicions about who I thought might be the killer after reading a partial ARC way back in August, so head to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8peXH... to watch that & hear a little more about this book!
