Title: Blood Will Out
Author: Jo Treggiari
Genre: Thriller, Young Adult
Format: eARC
Page Count: 256
Release Date: June 5, 2018
Synopsis:
Ari Sullivan is alive—for now.
She wakes at the bottom of a cistern, confused, injured and alone, with only the shadowy recollection of a low-pitched voice and a gloved hand. No one can hear her screams. And the person who put her there is coming back. The killer is planning a gruesome masterpiece, a fairytale tableau of innocence and blood, meticulously designed.
Until now, Ari was happy to spend her days pining for handsome, recent-arrival Stroud Bellows, fantasizing about their two-point-four-kids-future together. Safe in her small hometown of Dempsey Hollow. But now her community has turned very dangerous—and Ari may not be the only intended victim.
I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This in no way effects my overall rating of this book.
Going into this book, I was really excited. I was told that it had a similar vibe to Silence of the Lambs but in the form of a young adult book. What I wasn’t expecting was the mediocre writing, lack of plot, constant animal abuse/torture, and a disappointing reveal at the end.
As you can tell, I didn’t enjoy this book, mainly for the reasons listed above. Let me start by saying that I don’t read thrillers – ever. I also consider my tolerance for blood to be pretty high and it doesn’t really bother me when there’s violence/death/gore in a book.
Something that I thought was going to be just a one time deal was the torturing and death of animals. I have a really soft spot for anything that breathes. I don’t care what it is – if it’s a spider, leave it alone and let it live, if it’s a shark, just let it live its life in peace. I just really love animals. So reading this book – where animals were tortured and killed in descriptive detail – had me feeling sick to my stomach.
Like I said, I don’t mind blood and gore and death in the books I read. But describing every last single smell and feel of an animal’s insides and how it feels to take the life from them is… unnecessary. I felt myself sitting there nearly gagging because the author put so much description into these scenes.
Here’s the thing though – these scenes weren’t needed!!! Maybe one would have been good enough so that we get the idea that the killer dude is a psychopath but it was at least halfway through the book and the author kept describing the animal torturing when the killer’s point of view showed up.
Also. I’d like to say that the killer’s point of view chapters were so!! useless!! They did absolutely nothing to move the story forward and I felt like they were just there to fill up space because the author had nothing else to write about.
The actual writing of the book was… lackluster. It wasn’t particularly bad, but it felt to me like she only cared about writing in the killer’s point of view because that’s when – surprise, surprise – I skimmed the least. Oh. And I skimmed about the last 40% of the book because I seriously could not handle reading those torturing descriptions and the story just wasn’t moving forward.
Overall I feel like the author watched too many old slasher/thriller films one summer and decided that she was going to write one. But it didn’t work out as well as I think she hoped it would. I did want to like this book, I did. I just couldn’t 😦
My Rating: 1.5 Stars
It feels weird even giving it a 1.5 stars, but I feel like it would be a bit unfair because a) i didn’t guess the killer and b) the writing wasn’t that bad. But, overall, there were a lot of problematic aspects and it just wasn’t enjoyable for me to read.
TW: homophobic slurs, transphobia, animal abuse/slaughter, child abuse, mentions of rape
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I’m with you on this one – I found this extremely disturbing and a flat, uninteresting story. The animal abuse was terrible… made me go give my very loved kitties an extra cuddle. ☹️
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I had to give my dogs some hugs as well after reading this. It made me feel terrible because it’s just… so cruel??
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Ahhhhh! I can totally see why this book wasn’t your cup of tea!
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I wish it was, but it was a miss for me
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It wasn’t my favourite either! Haha
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Oh wow, sounds indeed very disturbing… one of those books that makes you want to psychoanalyze the author. I loved your review tho 😁!
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Hahaha I really felt a bit disturbed thinking of the author’s mental state when she wrote this book
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I bet 😮 Hope your next read is more pleasant 😁
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Great review! So sad because the premise for this book sounds so good! I will not be picking it up though due to the shear fact of animal torture. (thanks for the heads up BTW) I cannot handle any type of abuse towards animals and will have to pass on this one.
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I was so saddened with this part of the book (and it kept showing up which made me have an issue with it). No problem, glad to be helpful!
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