Don’t Breathe a Word By Jennifer McMahon Book Review
I am starting to get bored with this author. One of my all-time favorite books, and what got me more interested in reading horror, was her book, The Winter People. It was terrifying and I couldn’t put it down. Reading many of McMahon’s other books, though, I have found them repetitive and formulaic. They are all set up in the same fashion. They all have that aspect of characters questioning the supernatural of the world in the same way.
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This book is exactly that. To make matters worse, it is a slow burn in the beginning. It was so difficult to push myself to keep reading this. You can tell this is an earlier works of McMahon because the jumps in the timeline to the past don’t connect with what is happening or about to happen, as her later books. The Winter People, the time jumps were perfectly placed. Here, there was often little or nothing to be said, or it ruined the tensions.
The characters were not overly interesting either. Especially in the beginning. I could never really find myself caring about Sam or Phoebe. They were just kind of boring. The main characters of the past, Lisa and Evie had good dynamics but it always felt surface detailed and little digging deeper into the other relations they had with family and friends. Comparing it to Stephen King’s IT, those children felt more real than the children in this book.
That said, about two thirds into the book, the pace picked up. And boy did the ride get exciting. Even though I knew the answer to the question of, is the Fairy King real? I couldn’t help myself from getting sucked into the characters’ thoughts when flipping back and forth over the question. The insanity of the situation was fun and well written. I read the back half of this book in a matter of two sittings, where it took me weeks to get through the first half of the book. McMahon captured the magic of storytelling that she will hone and use in her later books to better effect.
Overall this book was okay. Worth the read, but nothing overly memorable. It’s a little on the long side for the pacing, but once we get into the action, it doesn’t slow down. It’s formulaic and predictable, but still gut wrenching and compelling. Learning what the “truth” is and how Lisa was treated after she was taken will stick in my head and haunt me for some time. The betrayal of Lisa’s family and Phoebe’s decent into madness at the end hit all the right spots for a horror/thriller. At the end of the day it really is the first half of the story that hurts it so badly. But if you can get through that, there is a good payoff.
