Saturday 8 August 2015

Shiver the Whole Night Through by Darragh McManus

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Book Blurb (From Goodreads) 
After months of bullying and romantic heartbreak, seventeen-year-old Aidan Flood feels just about ready to end it all. But when he wakes up one morning to find that local beauty and town sweetheart Sláine McAuley actually has, he discovers a new sense of purpose, and becomes determined to find out what happened to her. The town is happy to put it down to suicide, but then one night Aidan gets a message, scratched in ice on his bedroom window: 'I didn't kill myself.' Who is contacting him? And if Sláine didn't end her own life... who did?










My Review: 
I picked this book up by chance and was so interested by the title that I had to get it. The title is from an old folk song called my girl, my girl or Where did you sleep last night. I would recommend listening to it if you want to read this book i'll put the link to one of the versions HERE
I don't know how to describe this book other then a book about bullying with an unhealthy romance which also has unnecessary paranormal activity and a side of murder. I would of loved this book as just a mystery murder book where a popular girl dies for no reason and one boy sets off to find out the truth. In my opinion I think that, that was all the author needed to do to make it a great fast paced thriller but they took it a step further and added in demons and ghosts. That was were everything was taken too far and it left a lot of questions which were never really answered which made the end of the book disappointing and frustrating. I don't mind mystery paranormal but it was just not well executed in this particular book. Also one of my biggest pet peeves whilst reading or watching something is when there is a message or a lesson in it but the movie director or the author just keeps on slapping you in this face with it every second sentence. In this case that message was don't bully people, but it became one of the main focuses of the book when the main focus should of actually been the murders in this town. There were points in this book where I just thought, enough already! I get it! 
Aiden was just an incredibly naive character that just didn't quite know what he was doing the entire time. I mostly figured out the mystery in this story within the first clue (but if that is just because I read a lot and picked out the common mystery plot points, I don't know.) He relied to much on Salain to save him and answer all of his questions. Salain was a girl that had just recently died and come back but to be honest you would think that she had been dead for a millennial. All throughout the book I doubted her ability to love and feel because apart from the small gestures here and there she did nothing to really show emotion of even much curiosity in how she died. 
I would just like to take a moment her to also point out how unhealthy Aiden and Salain's relationship became. It started out fine but then I started to feel like Aiden was going from being in love to being obsessed. He couldn't see when Salain was out of her mind and doing crazy S*$% and when he did find out about what she had been doing he just said that's fine and continued to love her. That is not how a normal person reacts!
All in all between the overambitious ending, the unhealthy romance and the poorly explained paranormal side of the book I give this book one out of five stars.


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