The Whisperwood Legacy is a genuinely creepy YA fantasy/mystery by Jo Schulte. Released 27th May 2025 by Hachette on their Young Readers imprint, it's 346 pages and is available in hardcover, audio, and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links.
This is a surprisingly horror-filled dark fantasy, uncomfortably full of jump scares and unlikable characters. They all *loathe* one another, and the narrative is told in staccato interludes woven between the current day and flashbacks. There are glimpses of some impressive world building (the chapter headers are full of whole-cloth German fairy tales which are interwoven in the plot as it plays out in real life).
The abandoned creepy amusement park with dangerous rides and extremely scary nightmares-come-to-life is well done and the author definitely has a knack with setting. That being said, it's quite graphically violent in places and might be a tad too explicit for young readers (or more sensitive ones) in the lower end of the target audience (12+). The language is also quite gratuitously rough (f-bombs every other sentence). It seems unnecessary.
The climax, denouement, and resolution are self contained in this novel, it's a standalone, but they're not particularly well resolved or satisfying.
Three stars. It's unclear who the target audience really is. It's too scary for younger readers, but too juvenile and not engaging enough for YA readers at the higher end of the range.
Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.
No comments:
Post a Comment