📖 BOOK REVIEW⠀📚 The Children on the Hill
AUTHOR: Jennifer McMahon @jennifermcmahonwrites
Publisher: Gallery Books @gallerybooks
Stars: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ + 🐰
Published: April 26, 2022
The Review 📚 The Children on the Hill
✨ The Title/Cover Draw:
- Jennifer Mcmahon is one of those authors I recently discovered and had to read more of.
💜 What I liked:
- This book was a beautiful homage to Frankenstein. It is told between the past and present. In the past, 2 children are living with their grandmother near a psych hospital where she works. In the present, a monster hunter podcaster is looking for a solution to some missing girls. It is so creepy and mysterious.
😱 What I didn’t like:
- There was the ending that seemed out of place, but also not (difficult to explain). But there is a major twist I should have seen coming but didn’t. It’s a good read nonetheless.
🚦 My face at the end: 🤓
💭 Reasons to Read:
- 1. Psychiatric patients
- 2. Past connections
- 3. Disappearing girls
- 4. Monster hunter
🕧 Mini-Summary:
- Lizzie Shelley is on the hunter to find monster sightings and the location of missing children. Is it a real monster or her sister?
I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own. Received from Netgalley.
💯 For more details on the books we read, be sure to follow me on TikTok (@zaineylaney) or check out our Podcast – Elated Geek!
📘 Summary 📚 The Children on the Hill
A genre-defying new novel, inspired by Mary Shelley’s masterpiece Frankenstein, which brilliantly explores the eerie mysteries of childhood and the evils perpetrated by the monsters among us.
1978: at her renowned treatment center in picturesque Vermont, the brilliant psychiatrist, Dr. Helen Hildreth, is acclaimed for her compassionate work with the mentally ill. But when she home with her cherished grandchildren, Vi and Eric, she’s just Gran—teaching them how to take care of their pets, preparing them home-cooked meals, providing them with care and attention and love.
Then one day Gran brings home a child to stay with the family. Iris—silent, hollow-eyed, skittish, and feral—does not behave like a normal girl.
Still, Violet is thrilled to have a new playmate. She and Eric invite Iris to join their Monster Club, where they catalogue all kinds of monsters and dream up ways to defeat them. Before long, Iris begins to come out of her shell. She and Vi and Eric do everything together: ride their bicycles, go to the drive-in, meet at their clubhouse in secret to hunt monsters. Because, as Vi explains, monsters are everywhere.
2019: Lizzy Shelley, the host of the popular podcast Monsters Among Us, is traveling to Vermont, where a young girl has been abducted, and a monster sighting has the town in an uproar. She’s determined to hunt it down, because Lizzy knows better than anyone that monsters are real—and one of them is her very own sister.
The Children on the Hill takes us on a breathless journey to face the primal fears that lurk within us all.