ARC Review: The Mystery of Hollow Places



Title: The Mystery of Hollow Places
Author: Rebecca Podos
Series: N/A, Standalone
Genre: Young Adult, Mystery, Contemporary
Publisher: Balzer & Bray
Publication Date: January 26th 2016
Pages: Kindle, 304 pages
My Rating: 3 Stars



  All Imogene Scott knows of her mother is the bedtime story her father told her as a child. It's the story of how her parents met: he, a forensic pathologist, she, a mysterious woman who came to identify a body. A woman who left Imogene and her father when she was a baby, a woman who was always possessed by a powerful loneliness, a woman who many referred to as troubled waters.

  When Imogene is seventeen, her father, now a famous author of medical mysteries, strikes out in the middle of the night and doesn't come back. Neither Imogene's stepmother nor the police know where he could've gone, but Imogene is convinced he's looking for her mother. She decides to put to use the skills she's gleaned from a lifetime of her father's books to track down a woman she's never known, in order to find him and, perhaps, the answer to the question she's carried with her for her entire life.

  Rebecca Podos' debut is a powerful, affecting story of the pieces of ourselves that remain mysteries even to us - the desperate search through empty spaces for something to hold on to.

  I was given an ARC by the publisher through Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review. 

  When Imogene was two years old, her mother took off unexpectedly without telling anyone why or where she was going to. Now Imogene is a teenager, and this time, it's her dad who took off without telling anyone. Imogene knows that she's the only one who can find her father, so she used various detective novels to help her reach her father.

  This book was not what I expected it to be. I expected this book to be centered on mystery, but I didn't feel pulled the mystery at all. However, as I read on, I realized that the mystery is not the main point of the novel. The main point was the journey that the main character took to find meaning and understand her family and herself even more. That is actually my favorite thing about the novel. However, I just couldn't rate this more than 3 stars.

  This book was interesting, yes, and I liked the journey that the main character took but I still feel like there's something missing from the book to make it more meaningful and compelling. I just wasn't that drawn into the story as much as I hoped to be, and I kept putting the book down because I wasn't compelled to read it. The story is interesting in it's own way though, so don't get me wrong. It was not boring; not at all. I just didn't feel the pull.

  While I was reading this novel, I was just like "meh" the whole time. I wasn't able to connect to the main character or any other character for that matter. In the end, I was neither shocked nor did I say, "Aha! I knew it!" I was just reading the book and not feeling anything, but I know that the story is nice.


3 'meh' stars


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