Helpful Score: 2
Holy Harry Potter.
The books I read tend to gravitate toward fantasy and horror, so there's a fair bit of magic in most of my stories of choice. However, I don't know if I've ever read a book that dealt with magic like that in The Boys Are Back in Town.
The book offers a great blend of warm nostalgia and gritty suspense, with many twists and turns and a plot that keeps pounding right up until the last page.
In The Boys Are Back in Town, Boston tabloid writer, Will, is getting ready to head home for his 10-year high school reunion. He's not thrilled about seeing the high school sweetheart who left him at the alter, but has been conned into going by his best friend and former girl next door, Ashleigh. Despite the dread of seeing his ex-fiancee and living up to the fact that he hasn't become a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, he's eager to see all of his old friends -- especially Mike Lebo, who he hasn't seen in years, but has been catching up with over e-mail.
When Will arrives at the reunion weekend, though, strange things start happening quickly. When he asks about his friend Mike, he's startled to learn -- and then remember -- that Mike died their senior year. Soon other strange memories start taking over Will's mind, and facts about his friends start changing, too. In some cases, even his friends themselves are changing before his very eyes. Will (and readers) are left with the mystery of unraveling what's real and what is illusion, and how to make heal both the past and the present in this tale that spans 11 years.
The story, overall, is chilling but not truly scary. It's disturbing, but not gory. The story line does jump around from Will's high school days to the present time, but the author does a great job of making sure that readers don't get lost along the way. And the ending? Let's just say, I didn't see it coming. Great, great stuff.
This was my first foray into the writing of Christopher Golden, and I'm very excited to pick up another of his novels in the future. He is very economical in his word use (which usually kind of turns me off) but I thought it really worked well in this story. He writes teenage boys exceptionally well, and it was refreshing to read something that was so unexpected and engrossing.
The books I read tend to gravitate toward fantasy and horror, so there's a fair bit of magic in most of my stories of choice. However, I don't know if I've ever read a book that dealt with magic like that in The Boys Are Back in Town.
The book offers a great blend of warm nostalgia and gritty suspense, with many twists and turns and a plot that keeps pounding right up until the last page.
In The Boys Are Back in Town, Boston tabloid writer, Will, is getting ready to head home for his 10-year high school reunion. He's not thrilled about seeing the high school sweetheart who left him at the alter, but has been conned into going by his best friend and former girl next door, Ashleigh. Despite the dread of seeing his ex-fiancee and living up to the fact that he hasn't become a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, he's eager to see all of his old friends -- especially Mike Lebo, who he hasn't seen in years, but has been catching up with over e-mail.
When Will arrives at the reunion weekend, though, strange things start happening quickly. When he asks about his friend Mike, he's startled to learn -- and then remember -- that Mike died their senior year. Soon other strange memories start taking over Will's mind, and facts about his friends start changing, too. In some cases, even his friends themselves are changing before his very eyes. Will (and readers) are left with the mystery of unraveling what's real and what is illusion, and how to make heal both the past and the present in this tale that spans 11 years.
The story, overall, is chilling but not truly scary. It's disturbing, but not gory. The story line does jump around from Will's high school days to the present time, but the author does a great job of making sure that readers don't get lost along the way. And the ending? Let's just say, I didn't see it coming. Great, great stuff.
This was my first foray into the writing of Christopher Golden, and I'm very excited to pick up another of his novels in the future. He is very economical in his word use (which usually kind of turns me off) but I thought it really worked well in this story. He writes teenage boys exceptionally well, and it was refreshing to read something that was so unexpected and engrossing.
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