My Boo's Review: Feral by Holly Schindler

Every once in a while on here, I'll be posting my girlfriend Emily's reviews on here. She doesn't blog on her own, but sometimes she needs to let her book feelings out in the world, and that's where Bitches n Prose steps in. (She also drew that banner. Ain't she cute?)


Title: Feral
Author: Holly Schindler
Format: ARC
Pub. Date: August 26th 2014
Source: Holly Schindler



★★★★★

Five stars.

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How far would you go to escape the horrors of your past? To regain the life you had before? Well, for junior journalist Claire Cain, moving states away wasn't far enough. Danger and mystery follow her from Chicago to Peculiar, Missouri where she stumbles upon the corpse of a missing high school student in the woods behind the town's school, and it's up to Clair to figure out the truth behind the girl's death.

Wow guys. Wow. This is probably the fastest I've ever finished a book of this size (apart from the Harry Potter series) I literally could not put it down. The synopsis did not lie when it said "The Lovely Bones meets Black Swan". I could see influences of both stories and how they came together beautifully to create this psychological thriller.

It's been a while since I've yelled at the pages like one would yell at a movie screen; asking who did it, voicing my opinions, pleading to be right or wrong, shouting out in fear or surprise. I must admit I let out a string of "oh god oh god oh god"s and a generous amount of colorful swears more than a few times during my read.

Feral is not just the name of this book, it's a theme that resonates throughout the story. Feral are the cats that overpopulate the small town of Peculiar. Feral are the nightmares that haunt Claire. Feral are the scars left behind by her attack, and the attackers themselves.

I absolutely loved all the characters in this book, even the ones I thought I shouldn't. They were all written fantastically, and their personalities were really set apart. No one really blended into the other, and it made it very easy to distinguish who was who.

Another thing I loved was that there was no love interest with the main character, Clair, as I feared there would be when she first meets Rich Ray in Peculiar, Missouri. Nothing more than friendship blossoms between them, and that is SO refreshing to see. There was nothing to distract from the main plot of the book, and that, I think, was what helped me fly through it so fast. There was no side distractions, every turn of the page brought me closer to knowing the truth.

One of the greatest things about this read was that I was never sure about who the killer was until the very end. I jumped from character to character and back to a previous character- I probably suspected everyone at one point or another, and the reveal still surprised me.

The only tiniest issues I had were two things. Claire's over use of "ground beef" to describe her body after her beating in Chicago- the scene haunts her so she goes back to it frequently, and for me, there was just too much ground beef, but not enough to hinder my enjoyment of the story. And sometimes sentences seemed either lazy or incomplete to me. An example being something like " "I don't know." he grunted, turning the keys in the ignition." " To me it just seemed like there should be more to the end of the sentence. But again, in no way did it hinder the flow of the story or my enjoyment.

All in all, this was a brilliant read, and I so enjoyed how enthralled I got reading it. It's rare for me to be completely submerged in a book from page one. And I hope you all find the same enthrallment as I did. I definitely recommend this book to fans of The Lovely Bones, Black Swan, Stephen King, and M. Night Shyamalan to name a few.

Thanks so much to the author, Holly Schindler, for giving me this book in exchange for an honest review. I loved it, as you can tell.

Review by my boo, Emily.