Fantastic book! I had high hopes when I started reading it and it did not disappoint. The character development is very similar to his fathers work and there’s a lot of references to Stephen kings characters but at the same time the story was so uniquely Joe Hill. At times I loved and hated the main character and at times I loved and hated the villain. He did a great job making you fall in love and get invested in all the characters and the chapters flowed very smoothly. He did transition from one chapter to the next quite uniquely a couple of times as you will see when you read the book. In the personal bonus for me was that the chapter to her for the most part reasonably short. I’m one of those where I don’t mind reading 100 to 200 chapters but I really prefer them to be short chapters; this was quite like that. Overall great unique story and I’m very glad I invested my time in reading this. ( )

I had to set this book down and I find myself having no desire to pick it up again at all. I really tried with this one but it’s like trying to listen to Marilyn Manson when you really wanted Pink Floyd. The writing style is just not to my liking at all. I read Heart Shaped Box years ago and thought of heavy metal during its read, but it had more depth than this novel. There’s a lot of empty room in the chapters with no real purpose and the only person worth any recognition is the stuttering librarian. ( )

Nothing going on in the first 100 pages or so that makes me want to continue reading. ( )

Kept me interested the whole way through, but ultimately I felt that after spending so much time providing so much detail about these characters' backstory, the ending felt a little rushed, and I guess I was expecting a bigger payoff or twist along the way than what I got.. ( )

Nos4A2 is scary, disturbing, beautiful, sad, and surprisingly touching. It's also one of the best books I've ever read. It's a non-traditional road-trippy, portal fantasy, vampire story about the cost of trauma and the value of family.

Victoria “Vic” McQueen is not like other kids. She’s good at finding things – impossible things, forgotten things, and lost things. With her beautiful, big Raleigh Tuff Burner bicycle, Vic is able to cross the Shorter Way Bridge – a bridge that only exists in her mind – and travel impossible distances in mere seconds, leading her directly to the places and things she needs to find. Creating, maintaining, and crossing the bridge takes its toll, though, and Vic learns that there’s a cost for travelling roads that shouldn’t exist with her mind.

She also learns that she’s not alone in her ability.

There’s a girl named Maggie, a badass librarian in Here, Iowa, who can divine answers from her beloved Scrabble tiles. There’s also a man named Charles Manx, who kidnaps children in his 1938 Rolls Royce Wraith and takes them on his own private road to a place outside of space and time called Christmasland. Manx is an energy vampire. He feeds on the children, changing them into cold, cruel, ageless creatures locked forever in his imagined world of eternal Christmas Eve. He never physically harms them and literally thinks he is saving them by kidnapping them and taking them to Christmasland. When seventeen year-old Vic goes out looking for trouble on her Tuff Burner, her bridge crosses Charles Manx’s path and Vic barely escapes with her life. With Manx incarcerated and later in a coma, Vic goes on to live her life, convinced that the Shorter Way Bridge was a delusion of her childhood and grows up to raise her son, Wayne (yes, named after Bruce Wayne). Though Vic has her problems with substance abuse (and continued hallucinations of Christmasland and vampiric children calling her in the night), Vic is finally getting herself together and dedicated to being a better mother to her twelve year-old boy. And that's when things change.

Charles Manx is declared dead and autopsied, but his body disappears from the morgue – and a 1938 Rolls Royce Wraith with a NOS4A2 license plate makes its terrifying way to Vic’s door, to make her pay, and take her son away to Christmasland. And Vic isn't going to let that happen.

Clocking in at just about 700 pages, Hill’s novel is monstrous in both form and in content – it’s also, by the way, SO influenced by his father Stephen King. And this is a good thing. Hill has such an imagination and such a way with characters. Although it's a monstrous novel, the drama, the fantasy, the horror of it all keeps the pages moving. All of Hill's characters are so human, so relatable that they are easy to cheer on, even when they are messing up.

A Creepy, Disturbing Thrill Ride, with a flawed, yet lovable heroine, NOS4A2 is Joe Hill at his best. This is literally one of my favorite novels of all time.

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