Review--The Bad Ones by Melissa Albert

 

Goddess, goddess, count to five
In the morning, who’s alive?

In the course of a single winter’s night, four people vanish without a trace across a small town.

Nora’s estranged best friend, Becca, is one of the lost. As Nora tries to untangle the truth of Becca’s disappearance, she discovers a darkness in her town’s past, as well as a string of coded messages Becca left for her to unravel. These clues lead Nora to a piece of local folklore: a legendary goddess of forgotten origins who played a role in Nora and Becca’s own childhood games...

An arresting, crossover horror fantasy threaded with dark magic, THE BAD ONES is a poison-pen love letter to semi-toxic best friendship, the occult power of childhood play and artistic creation, and the razor-thin line between make-believe and belief.

Melissa Albert's The Bad Ones had a very intriguing and creepy premise. It gives a lesson about the power of belief and the magic within. There's dealing with difficult friendships and other hardships, and a good mystery to boot.

Nora and Becca have been friends for years and then one night Nora gets an odd text message from Becca. They had been fighting and it was radio silence for months and then out of nowhere Nora receives a text that has her rushing to Becca's house in the middle of the night, only to find Becca's cellphone outside by the defunct pool. And come morning, it has been announced that Becca along with three other people are missing.

Nora thinks Becca may have run away as she always talked about leaving her stepmom's behind when she turned eighteen which was getting closer and closer. As to the other missing people, Nora wasn't sure what to make of their disappearances. Then Nora begins to find odd little clues left behind by Becca, things that bring back memories to Nora of their time as children when they created their own set of goddesses that they would worship and pray to.

It all gets pretty convoluted almost at this point. It's not that I wasn't grasping the storyline, but I felt bombarded with flashbacks. They were important ones for sure, but I felt like some of them could've been shorter or at least gotten its point across sooner. We probably spend a good third of the book lost in flashbacks. They eventually connect to the present day and the mystery afoot, but it just really kind of took me out of the mystery too many times that I felt like I was scrambling to get caught back up in present day after each trip down memory lane.

It's not until the last hundred pages or so that things finally start to come together, but alas it was through yet another flashback. One that took an exceedingly long time to get its point across and lay the message out. I don't mind a good flashback, especially if it helps the story move along, but this was another one of those where I thought we could shorten it up a bit. Sometimes, less is more, you know?

The ending itself was another puzzle of sorts. One of those weird, eerie mysteries you're still trying to puzzle together to see the answer in the end. I mean I feel like I got the gist of it all, but with being trapped in the past so many times, I am wondering if I might have forgotten something or other about the current mystery. I mean I know what happened, but not the explicit hows of it all. Just that weird feeling where you want to keep asking why and how.

All in all, The Bad Ones wasn't a bad read. It was intriguing, creepy and mysterious just like I had anticipated. But there was just too many flashbacks for me to really get into the story in the present day. The constant need to go back and remember specific things that didn't always pertain to the current situation got a little repetitive, but I can admit that the flashbacks did serve a point, I just wish they weren't so time consuming.

If you enjoy a good creepy, supernatural inspired mystery and don't mind a consistent use of flashbacks, then I highly recommend this one! It was a good read in a sense, I just wished for maybe a little more by a little less flashback.

Overall Rating 3.5/5 stars