Hallowmere: In the Serpent’s Coils by Tiffany Trent

This rambling is going to be kind of bad since it took me so long to read this book. I really enjoyed it; I was just reading a lot of other books at the same time and just was all around busy.

So for the sake of my sanity, I’ll steal the summary from the back of the book.

Ever since her parents died, Corrine’s dreams have been filled with fairies warning hero of impending peril. When she’s sent to live at Falston Manor, she thinks she’s escaped teh danger stalking her. Instead the dreams grow stronger, just as girls begin disappearing from school.

Then Corrine discovers letters of orbidden love by a medieval monk who writes of his friendship with the Fey. Sinister secrets at Falston plague Corrine even as her dreams grow more disturbing. In this atmosphere of riddles and lies, who can Corrine trust?

As Hallowe’en draws near Corrines knows only one thing for sure: another girl will disappear soon, and that girl just might be here.

After typing that whole thing, I realized that I have some problems with that summary, but that’s typical. The backs of books are usually misleading. For one thing, Corrine discovers the letters before Falston Manor, and the book actually doesn’t have a lot to do with Hallowe’en. But it’s close enough. Otherwise, it wouldn’t have been printed on the back of the book, would it?

So I did like this book. I liked the characters, though there’s still more to know about them, and I enjoyed the setting and the writing. As I said when talking about This Lullaby, I really like the third person past tense. I really liked it in this book, since I think that the prose echoed Corrine’s feelings a lot (I noticed it at one moment in particular) and that strengthed the book. Definitely a step above the “show, don’t tell” rule. And it’s an intriguing plot, though as the first book in the series…it does have a cliffhanger ending and plenty of mysteries that still need to be solved. Fortunately, I have By Venom’s Sweet Sting.