Christina Henry

I love Henry's writing. I love her characters. I think Red was delusional.

Guns are a really big problem, but hacking people up with an axe and letting them bleed out is okay? Jesus, that's scary. People around her reacted to that appropriately. They looked at her with surprise or gape in amazement.

Because the gun thing is repeated so many times in the book with predictable responses, I assumed a lot of her other problems were part of her delusions as well. All men were rapists or out to get show more her even when they were clearly demonstrating that they weren't. I had hope that she might begin to trust someone, but she never released that grip on herself. There were nasty people out there, so it wasn't all a delusion.

Don't get me started on the racial stuff. Her brother's reactions to her were enough to go by for that. Her brother annoyed me at the beginning, but by the time they parted, I was really wishing that he wasn't leaving because he was the level-headed one. Don't think about Adam. Another clue that she wasn't seeing things clearly.

That doesn't mean that I didn't like her as a character. I did. But she was an incredibly unreliable narrator.

I liked the book a great deal.

Until the end. Which went like this:

Christina Henry: Book, book, book. Lovely book halfway finished. OMG, look at that deadline. The End.

It ended in the middle of the book. I'm glad I didn't have a paper copy of the book because I would have thrown it across the room and broken something. show less

This one gets all the stars! This was so good. I have read the Alice in wonderland book once and seen various versions of the movie. I can honestly say the only one I like is the animated movie. But this book took the story and kicked it in the butt!

This book is not for the faint of heart. There is a lot of violence and some gore. There is all manner of cruelty toward humans and animals and there is rape (although not graphically depicted). This is one of the books where you root for the show more protagonists and the characters don't make stupid decisions that piss you off and make you happy when it inevitably comes back the bite them.

The story follows Alice, who is from the New City. She ventured into the Old (forbidden) City with her best friend Dor. When she returns she has been raped, her face is scarred, no one knows what happened to Dor, and Alice is somewhat mad (as a hatter). She is put into an asylum and meets Hatcher through a mouse hole in the wall between them. For years they keep one another company and help each other maintain a modicum of sanity. When a fire breaks out, Hatcher and Alice escape and thus their adventure to stop the Jabberwocky begins.

This is just really great storytelling. We meet the characters of the original book, the Rabbit, Cheshire, Tweedle Dee and Dumb...only they're all very twisted and dark versions of themselves. The ending is actually satisfying, but also leaves the door open for the sequel, which I will be starting immediately because I need to know what happens next for Alice and Hatcher! This is an excellent retelling, which may even convince me to give the source material another try. show less

Harry loves horror films, so when she gets a job cleaning house for renowned horror director Javier Castillo, she can't believe her luck. Castillo’s Chicago mansion is filled with props, posters, and paraphernalia from all her favorite films, and she gets to spend her days taking care of these items. She should be having so much fun. She is also so very careful to respect Castillo’s privacy. She never asks him questions...especially not about the family scandal that forced him to leave show more Hollywood. Then when Harry starts hearing voices in several totally empty rooms and seeing things move around by themselves...her thoughts can’t help going back to the whereabouts of Castillo’s missing family. The house has secrets, some dark and maybe dangerous...secrets that she can’t ignore...but exploring and uncovering them could result in her losing much more than just her job. This book called to me from the library shelves, and I HAD to take it home with me. I really connected with Harry from the first. The story is told almost exclusively from her point-of-view and in the present, with the occasional short chapter about her past life. She came from a very strict and overly religious family who did not approve of her film choices or many of her other choices either. Several short chapters tell us about the house's scandal that Harry is only guessing about through most of the story. These three different perspectives really help to give insights into the Harry and Castillo characters. Harry is A 30-something-year-old single mother with a teenage son, Gabe. She's trying to keep their heads above water in Chicago where work is hard to come by. Gabe is facing all the trials of high school with the richer kids and facing the painful truth that he can’t have everything that they have, and Harry really has no emotional support for herself. It’s a bleak existence made worse when her new landlord chooses to sell the house she lives in, meaning that she now also has to look for a new place to live. These financial pressures explain very well why Harry looked the other way ignoring the creepy things going on in the house... and why she puts up with all the strict rules she has to follow while working. I believed from the first that the readers are meant to know who the true monster is in this story and that knowledge, along with a steady stream of supernatural incidents, raises the story’s tension about a 150%. It's a book you will find almost impossible to put down even though it has a much slower pace than other some other books of this genera that you might have read. My only criticism was that the ending was much too abrupt. After building a connection with the characters, I wanted to know how they coped after the ending. That was the only reason the book didn't get 5 stars. show less

I had loved Peter Pan as a kid and read it to pieces. And then I got older and Peter started being creepy and I was not comfortable with many things about the book. I feel like Henry's book vindicated my feelings. (Also, it does not escape me that the boys in the book grew up when they fell out of love with Peter, somewhat parallel to me falling out of love with him when I grew up. Hmm.)

This book was never going to have a happy ending based on the premise alone, but I still rooted for Jamie show more and Sal and Charlie. And I was still a bit surprised at just how brutal and dark it was - both physically (there was a lot of death) and psychologically. This book was one giant allegory to being in an abusive relationship. Peter was a gaslighting, manipulative sociopath. And just like an abuser, if he couldn't have something, no one could.

Well worth the read. I will definitely be checking out Henry's other books. show less