Review: Thornhill

Author: Kathleen Peacock
Date of Publication: September 10 2013
Pages: 368
Series: Hemlock #2
Source: Library

Mac can’t lose another friend. Even if he doesn’t want to be found.

The ripple effect caused by Mac’s best friend Amy’s murder has driven Mac’s new love, Kyle, to leave Hemlock and disappear from her life forever. But Mac knows that Kyle plans to enroll in a rehabilitation camp, where he can live with other werewolves. She refuses to accept his decision, especially since the camps are rumored to be tortuous. So she sets out in search of Kyle with a barely sober Jason—and Amy’s all-seeing ghost—in tow.

Clues lead Mac to find Kyle in a werewolf den in Colorado—but their reunion is cut short by a Tracker raid. Now Mac and Kyle are trapped inside the electric fences of Thornhill, a camp for young werewolves. As she devises an escape plan, Mac uncovers dangerous secrets buried within the walls of Thornhill—and realizes that the risk to the people she loves is greater than ever before.

Review:

Recaptains is an absolutely amazing website. I started Thornhill remembering that I was a fan of Hemlock, but beyond that I completely forgot most of the specifics. The Recaptains summary helped me catch up in a way. I still feel like if I read Thornhill with a greater memory of Hemlock, I would have enjoyed it more.

Thornhill is very readable. It's too easy to just keep flipping pages regardless of how late in the night it is. The story is absorbing, but I also did not really like the plot as much in this one. I felt like the story moved extremely fast, just a few days in fact, and so I didn't really feel a build up of suspense or action.

There was definitely action. Mac, Jason and Serena depart to find Kyle and bring him back home. Somehow though, they get into an enormous mess. I guess I had seen this type of storyline a few times now and I absolutely believed in the inevitability of their success. That's not exactly conductive to being hyped up for a book.

I still enjoyed the characters and would have liked a little more focus on them. Mac is capable and just warm. She has a way of drawing people to her by just being a trustworthy person. She's very likable. I also really liked Jason, who was sarcastic, sometimes burly, but always there for Mac when she needed him. Kyle was a little less in the story, but again, he was always focused on protecting Mac. She's a pretty lucky girl to have so much devotion from the two guys, but that's because she would do the same for them, and they both know it.

I don't feel like Thornhill really clicked for me. It wasn't that that there were things I didn't like. Instead, I kind of wanted more. I wanted more world building and character building and suspense. I feel like a lot of these things wouldn't have been an issue if I had read Hemlock more recently, but it's not unreasonable to expect a sequel to build the same areas up, right? In terms of setting, more parts of the Hemlock world like the camps and the packs were explained, but even then I don't feel like there was that much growth.

One part I can pretty definitively say I didn't like was when Mac would go to sleep and Amy would show up. What is exactly is the relevance of those scenes? All that would happen is Amy saying "something awful is going to happen, it's so awful" and then some kind of bloody weirdness would wake Mac up. It added nothing to the plot and there was very minimal character development. What it did do was take me out of the story every time it happened. It was like a commercial break, and I didn't like it.

I started out this review thinking I liked Thornhill, but by the end of my review, I've discovered that there was a lot I wasn't satisfied with. So, I'm giving Thornhill two stars. It was very meh in the end.

-P.E.