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Reviewed by:
  • Alone by Cyn Balog
  • Karen Coats
Balog, Cyn Alone. Sourcebooks Fire,
2017 [288p] ISBN 978-1-4926-5547-3 $17.99
Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 7-10

Seda's mother has inherited a decrepit old mansion, formerly run by relatives as a murder mystery hotel, and Seda is upset that her mother refuses to sell the property to anyone who won't continue its tradition. She's more troubled, though, that the voice inside her head, which has been with her since childhood, is growing angrier and more powerful the longer they stay at the creepy mansion. When a group of boarding-school students get stranded at the hotel in a snowstorm on their way to a ski holiday, Seda doesn't want them to see how weird she and the whole situation are, but her mother seeks to make the best of it by staging an elaborate murder-themed scavenger hunt—a plan that goes dangerously awry. The slow spooling out of Seda's devolution from angsty, sympathetic teen to seriously unreliable narrator is well handled; the sense of unease grows as Seda moves from seeming ordinary, to just a bit off, to full-on mentally unstable and vindictive. Along the way, Balog cannily suggests several different possibilities: that the problems might be her mother's, or that there may be something sinister about the way her younger siblings, two sets of twins, are too at ease among the gruesome props in the house, or that there may in fact be something real behind Seda's fears, making the suspense nail-bitingly effective and the final reveal surprising. Hints of both The Shining and The Turn of the Screw haunt this tense thriller as readers are placed in the same position as the other characters in their misreading of Seda. KC

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