Hollow City | ⭐⭐⭐ | Review

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Hollow City

Written by Ransom Riggs

Published February 2015 by Quirk Books

#HistoricalFiction, #Fantasy, #YoungAdult, #Adventure, #MagicalRealism

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Alright, ladies and gentlemen my first review post Spring Semester.  Unfortunately I am not enthralled with this book.  I remember really enjoying the first novel.  I preordered Hollow City though I only had enough time to get around to it now.

Ransom Riggs definitely created an interesting world and enhances it ten fold with all of the found photography.  I love that this novel explores the way his world works and I was captured by the ins and outs of peculiar life, even if it was on the run.  However there were a few inconsistencies that pulled me out of the story, nothing major but enough to make me stop and wonder.

I think one of the strongest points in Riggs writing is his ability to create characters with individual personalities.  All of the peculiar children have very unique perspectives despite having spent so much time together.  All of their little quirks make them all the more lovable and I often found myself reading solely to figure out what was going to happen to everyone.  There was only one moment in this book where I felt a character did something unlike himself for plot reasons and it was very near to the end of the book.  If this had happened sooner in the book it could have been a deal breaker for me however, it was toward the end and it was fairly obvious why this was happening.  This is one of my pet peeves though and definitely colored the way I thought of the book overall.

Plot-wise, I wasn't enamored with this either.  This was definitely a book that was meant to be exciting and gripping, I should have been sitting at the edge of my seat turning each page as if my life depended on it.  Instead I was turning pages to figure out how things worked or if any of the characters would be injured.  Some of the events of the novel seemed forced to me, like they were added in to make it more exciting.  I guess I just felt that the plot was being told to me as if I was a young child.  Perhaps it is intended for a younger audience who is willing to follow his every word more intently.  I'm not sure.

The writing definitely seemed like it was meant for a younger audience.  This is a young adult book but a young adult book doesn't need to be simplistic.  I could also say that the simplistic dialogue comes from the ages of the characters within the novel but the protagonist is an older teenager and even those young children in the novel are sometimes hundreds of years old.  I wasn't satisfied with it completely.

All in all, I am a bit disappointed with this novel. I wanted more from it.  I like the world and the characters and it might even be enough for my to pick up the third book, however I'm not sure if I will be pre-ordering it or if I will just read it opportunistically.  It definitely has its own aesthetic which I like very much.  I gave it three out of five stars on Goodreads, not terrible, but not outstanding either.