The Cellar

This book was so messed up. The horrors of what Clover did to all those girls, both the physical and mental ones, had me squirming in my seat. The fact that there are people out there who legitimately believe the same things as Clover is unsettling.

Seeing the effects that captivity had on Summer, and through her eyes the others, was so sad. The last few chapters showed the mental scarring that Summer will have to deal with.

The writing was simplistic, but it captured me. Clover is a monster and deserves far worse than what happened to him.

The story overall left me without words.

Seriously creepy book with very mature themes. Summer is kidnapped and held in a basement with 3 other girls who have the names of Rose, Poppy and Violet. Clover wants the women to act a certain way and be perfect and has renamed them after flowers. He also kidnaps prostitutes and tortures and rapes and kills them and the "flower girls" have to clean up afterwards. If the "flower girls" don't follow the rules, they will suffer the same fate. Summer tries desperately to hold on to her old self, her old name as the months tick by. Will she be rescued? Can she convince the other girls to gang up against Clover and escape?
Harrowing horror story for older readers.

Summer is a 16-year-old who's kidnapped by a man who calls himself Clover. Clover renames her "Lily" and tells her that she is now his family, along with three young women who he has named Poppy, Rose, and Violet. The four of them live in the cellar of Clover's home, entirely dependent upon him. Although his behavior is initially relatively predictable, over the next few months of Summer's captivity he becomes more and more unstable.

Meanwhile, Lewis, Summer's boyfriend, and Summer's friends and family are all looking for her, refusing to give up hope that she might still be alive.

This was a quick read, but not really a very good one. Emotionally, it was very one-note. It alternated between views of the present and past, from Clover, show more Lewis, and Summer's POVs (first person, present tense). Many scenes could easily have been cut - they didn't contribute anything new to the story or characters that previous scenes hadn't already done. Yes, we get it, Lewis and Summer are teenagers but they're absolutely in love and would never stop hoping to be together again. Yes, Clover has Mommy issues and separates women into two categories, "whore" and "pure."

There was a lot of violence - shortly after Summer was added to Clover's "family," she witnessed him stab a woman to death. And while I'm not generally someone who clamors for more gore, after the third or fourth time Clover simply stabbed someone in the stomach and they instantly died, I started wishing Preston would either make the deaths off-page or start doing something different with them. The rape, thankfully, was off-page.

While I could understand why Summer thought and acted the way she did, it still annoyed me. Immediately after ending up in the cellar, she put herself in a mental group separate from Rose and Poppy, who she repeatedly described as acting like they didn't want to leave. This lasted for months, even after a new person was added to the "family," tried to enlist Summer's help to escape, and Summer did nothing right along with Poppy and Rose when the new girl made her attempt. It never seemed to occur to her that it wasn't that Rose and Poppy didn't want to leave (although Rose's three years in the cellar definitely messed her up) but that they couldn't see any other way to survive. Eventually, I saw Summer's "I'm different from those girls who don't really want to leave" attitude as a way of reassuring herself that she wasn't breaking, but it was still frustrating to see those thoughts repeated over and over.

The ending felt unfinished. Several characters' stories were wrapped up off-page. It felt weirdly unreal, like the author was going to jump out with a last second twist. Really, though, there were no twists here, and very little that even qualified as a surprise.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.) show less

“They were as pure as flowers.”

This was a true horror story - the story of Summer's late night abduction and her storage in a house with 3 other women. They try to survive and hide around the man who's held them. He names them flowers, demanding they shake off who they were and become who they wants them to be.

Rose, Poppy, Violet and......now Lily.

But Lily is younger than the others and her nationwide manhunt is pushing their captor to the brink. But if he can't hold it together, will they die down in the remodeled cellar.

This was a very twisted story, with shocking fury and brutality from their captor and the sick twist of them being a perfect little garden family. The contrast was ugly.

But my biggest frustration were all the show more POV. I didn't mind Lewis' POV - it was interesting to see what was happening outside of the cellar. But I didn't want Clover's POV. I thought he was sick and twisted and I didn't care what his reasoning was or his slow slide into even wider madness. I wouldn't want to read another story about Summer but if the series sticks with new situations, I'll keep reading. show less

This book was so messed up. The horrors of what Clover did to all those girls, both the physical and mental ones, had me squirming in my seat. The fact that there are people out there who legitimately believe the same things as Clover is unsettling.

Seeing the effects that captivity had on Summer, and through her eyes the others, was so sad. The last few chapters showed the mental scarring that Summer will have to deal with.

The writing was simplistic, but it captured me. Clover is a monster and deserves far worse than what happened to him.

The story overall left me without words.

This book was so messed up. The horrors of what Clover did to all those girls, both the physical and mental ones, had me squirming in my seat. The fact that there are people out there who legitimately believe the same things as Clover is unsettling.

Seeing the effects that captivity had on Summer, and through her eyes the others, was so sad. The last few chapters showed the mental scarring that Summer will have to deal with.

The writing was simplistic, but it captured me. Clover is a monster and deserves far worse than what happened to him.

The story overall left me without words.

At times this reminded me of Criminal Minds, which I love, and at other times it reads like a Lifetime movie. We get 3 main POVs in here; Summer/Lily (who was kidnapped), Collin/Clover (the kidnapper), and Lewis (Summer's boyfriend). For the most part the book was engaging and kept me wanting to turn the pages. There were a couple times (Lewis or Collin's chapters) when I wanted to skip ahead, but overall I didn't want to put this down. This book is pretty cliché and uses a lot of familiar tropes, but what kept me reading was wanting to find out how Summer was going to escape. Like I said it's cliché and predictable and reads like a Lifetime movie, so I knew she'd eventually escape that's not a surprise, but I wanted to know HOW she'd show more do it. That being said, the climax and ending were very underwhelming. It felt like it ended way too quick and it wasn't even clear how it happened. Also, I wanted to see more of the investigative side of this case and less trips down the characters memory lanes. I feel like it might have been better if we could have had the POV of a detective working this case. They could have replaced Lewis' POV with the detective's; I honestly don't think his POV adds much to the story anyway. Overall, it was OK, kept me engaged, but underwhelmed where it actually matters. show less