Book 86
What Stalks Among Us by Sarah Hollowell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Thanks to NetGalley for this one. I enjoyed this YA horror immensely...after a while. For me it was a bit of a slow starter and it took a few time loops to get into it. The premise is both simple and complex at the same time. Sadie (who's first person point of view we're in) and her bestie Logan decide to play hookey from the school field trip to the amusement park and end up in a strange corn maze because that's an October thing and it's early spring when they find it.
This is a hard one to review without spoiling things so I'll keep it to the blurb. The maze functions almost like a video game where it resets itself and Sadie and Logan have to fight to keep their memories of the previous time loop because they've found their own dead bodies and if they keep dying they know they'll never get out of the loop. The maze has more secrets than that but those are best left to the reader to discover on their own.They're worth it. As a content warning there is a crap ton about abusive relationships and domestic violence in this. Most of it is not on page but it is discussed a lot. The resolution of the story felt right and was satisfying (because it would have been easy to go off the rails on this one)
Sadie and Logan are good characters with a lot to like about them but I did have a few problems so I can talk about that without spoilers. For one, Logan doesn't feel like a truly formed character in some ways. Maybe it's because it's in first person pov or that there is a sameness to them. Both he and Sadie are ADHD, anxious and bisexual. The major difference is Sadie is an overweight girl and Logan is an Asian/Caucasian male. But there is so much the same that it feels like Logan isn't entirely his own man. True many of our friends are very much like ourselves but in ways Logan felt like his only role was to be Sadie's bestie and to validate all her feelings which seems to be Logan's main function. I wish he had a louder voice in this because No Sadie without Logan/No Logan without Sadie was repeated ad nauseum in this and I wanted Logan to have a few more quirks to call his own.
The other issue for me is Sadie herself and this is dangerous ground to tread on because the author's note says how much of herself is in this. As for me the reader/reviewer, I too am an overweight woman with anxiety and ADHD and we're in the your mileage may vary territory. Most of Sadie's thoughts are about how fat and anxious she is and how much she wished she was more fat positive like her cousin. You know what, fine, that absolutely needs addressed. But that seems to be the end all be all of Sadie and yes, I know that there are overweight women out there who might spend all day every day thinking about it.
I personally don't. And it's in every chapter. It's every few pages. Some of it is the repetitiveness of the early time loop stuff. But Sadie never really moves beyond that. It's her main thought right after how do we get out of this maze. Her weight issues and the anxiety from them play into the abusive relationship as well. Don't get me wrong, some of that is needed. It helps shine a light on what people go through being that overweight. On the other than, she exhausted me because that's about all she seems to think about. It wasn't a deal breaker for the story but I really wished there had been more to her than that because about the only other things i remember about her is she thought she was good at mazes and she lost her friendships over her gas lighting emotionally abusive boyfriend.
The last compliant is to be taken with a grain of salt because I know from first hand experience how little an author has input on covers. I barely recognized Sadie was overweight from that cover. Her own description has her unable to sit in chairs with arms and the reason for not going to the amusement park is she's too fat for the rides. I know how big I am (bigger than the girl on the cover) and I fit in chairs/rides so I can guess how big Sadie must be and it was a disappointment the publisher didn't use cover art with a truly obese character on the cover (especially when we have books like the Faith Herbert series out there with an obvious plus sized protagonist)
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