Review--The Hollow by Jessica Verday

When Abbey's best friend, Kristen, vanishes at the bridge near Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, everyone else is all too quick to accept that Kristen is dead?and rumors fly that her death was no accident. Abbey goes through the motions of mourning her best friend, but privately, she refuses to believe that Kristen is really gone. Then she meets Caspian, the gorgeous and mysterious boy who shows up out of nowhere at Kristen's funeral, and keeps reappearing in Abbey's life. Caspian clearly has secrets of his own, but he's the only person who makes Abbey feel normal again...but also special.
 
Just when Abbey starts to feel that she might survive all this, she learns a secret that makes her question everything she thought she knew about her best friend. How could Kristen have kept silent about so much? And could this secret have led to her death? As Abbey struggles to understand Kristen's betrayal, she uncovers a frightening truth that nearly unravels her—one that will challenge her emerging love for Caspian, as well as her own sanity.

Continuing to tackle the older section of my TBR pile and read Jessica Verday's The Hollow. I wasn't really sure what to expect with this one and surprised myself by reading it in one day. That said, I can't honestly say that I liked it all that well. I mainly was forcing myself to read it because I wanted to see if things got better, but it took a long while.

The pacing felt incredibly slow for some reason. Moving from having a symbolic funeral and having Abbey wonder if her best friend is even okay or alive when everyone else presumes her dead. That part was interesting enough. Then she meets a strange boy at the funeral and is drawn to him for some reason and she can't understand why. Soon a bond begins to form between the two and Abbey is slowly falling for him, but Caspian has his own secrets that threatened to ruin things for them.

So it sounds interesting, and Abbey even starts to mildly investigate the death of her friend when everyone assumes it was suicide based on general observations and whatnot. I can understand the mystery not being solved in book 1, but really Abbey only started to investigate and then we're cutoff after her one step towards solving the mystery. And then really things just go on to be a normal book, dealing with normal high school things with nothing mysterious going on whatsoever. And the book is just over 500 pages long, so that's a lot of simple mundane stuff going on for a long time.

Then at the end things finally start to pick up, but then of course it's the end! And a lot of the surprises were kind of out there. Like I had a suspicion of one sort of, but seriously it was just way shocking and not really in the good way. I'm not entirely sure if I will be continuing this series or not, but I am at least glad that I gave it a try for the covers have really been quite eye-catching and I am still mildly curious to see what happens next. Maybe if I win the next one again somewhere down the line I would read it if I ever have the time as well. The TBR pile just continues to grow!

Overall I give this one 2.5/5 stars. If the pacing had been a little better than I would have likely scored higher, but it was rather slow at several points in the story that just didn't go well for me. It wasn't horrible or anything, just not my kind of book.