Reading Cherie Priest is a lot like having a friend who tells the best stories that you never get tired of. Fast-pasted, this book never let me down and I look forward to reading more. ( )

The premise of this one is pleasantly creepy, and the childhood scenes are excellent. Once Eden grows up, however, the tension slacks quite a bit and there are a lot of scenes of the "driving around and asking people questions" type. I didn't find Eden very interesting as a character, and the character of Harry is a throwaway. Still, the scene at the abandoned asylum is terrific and the climactic scene in which the ghosts reenact their old crimes is great. ( )

Creepy, twisty, and full of atmosphere, this story was good, scary fun. I really liked Eden. While she does have suspiciously useful poetry, knife, and car identification skills, she was a believable characters, and pulled me along on her search for answers in deeply held family secrets.
The beginning scenes from her childhood didn't rig quite true for me, but once it settled into present time, I started to care for Eden and her adopted parents. I look forward to the next instalment.
The landscape is particularly well used to add to the growing tension in the story - forest, swamp, old family graveyard, gothic mansion, and abandoned institution, all these clichéd settings were given fresh life, and described so clearly I could smell them ( )

"Four and Twenty Blackbirds" is more creepy than horrifying, but it's a constant creeping dread, even when you figure out much of what's going on before the protagonist does. An odd decision by one of the characters later on in the book saps some of the tension out as it doesn't seem to be justified by anything other than narrative necessity, but the climax is still gripping.

Cherie Priest's horror novel follows the seemingly haunted Eden, as she grows up in an adopted family, in atmosphere suffused with family secrets. Secrets tied to why a man attempted to kill her when she was still a child, and who exactly the ghosts haunting her - or protecting her - are. Priest keeps up the tension surrounding the central mystery, but the physical threat to Eden is never entirely convincing until it gets ratcheted up at the end; and the incompetence of the police is odd. It's still a good horror novel, with blood and family center stage. ( )

I really like Cherie's blog (cmpriest on livejournal), so I decided to check out one of her books. This will make her the third author whose books I read after I was already a fan of their blog. I am not a big fan of horror, though, so I made my sister read it first, so she could tell me if I'd be able to read it or not.

Eden is an orphan who occasionally sees the ghosts of her dead relatives, has a cousin who keeps trying to kill her, and that's just the beginning of her family dysfunctions. She finds out just how crazy it all is when she starts probing into her family's past - but if she hadn't, things could have turned out a whole lot worse...

I did like it, although not quite as much as I expected. Eden never seemed to take much of anything seriously, and the book was in first person, so the whole book had a rather sarcastic tone and a pretty even level of emotion. Which on the one hand, meant it wasn't especially scary, even for a horror-phobe like me, but on the other hand...it felt like it should have been scarier. ( )