The Vines

I wanted to love it, but . . .

The premise, when I read it, thrilled me. A mysterious island, known to few, in the shadow of NYC, abandoned to nature and hiding deadly secrets? Yes please! But no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t get the book to live up to my hopes. As others have said, there’s a lot of jumping around in time, which in itself would not bother me, but some seemed so unnecessary and confusing. Characters were clunky and one-dimensional, with little complexity and did not develop as the book went along. Then the “cliffhanger” ending? No thank you. I won’t be buying a sequel to see what happens next as I didn’t get enough enjoyment out of this first installment.

I think this could have been an excellent story, but somewhere it just fell flat. I really wish I had loved it as much as I expected to, but it did not come close to meeting my standards.

The Vines was a very interesting, intense super-natural Southern Gothic thriller/horror.

It's a vary layered story - weaving together the past and present of several different characters. There were things happening that at initial thought were pointless, but later on turned out to be extremely important.

It's gory too, so bonus!