The Hollow Review

Rating: ♥♥.5

When Abbey's best friend, Kristen, vanishes at the bridge near Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, everyone else is all too quick to accept that Kristen is dead and rumors fly that her death was no accident. Abbey goes through the motions of mourning her best friend, but privately, she refuses to believe that Kristen is really gone. It only makes things worse that everyone now treats Abbey like either a freak show or a charity case. Thank goodness for Caspian, the gorgeous and mysterious boy who shows up out of nowhere at Kristen's funeral, and keeps reappearing in Abbey's life. Caspian clearly has secrets of his own, but he's the only person who makes Abbey feel normal again...but also special.

Just when Abbey starts to feel that she might survive all this, she learns a secret that makes her question everything she thought she knew about her best friend. How could Kristen have kept silent about so much? And could this secret have led to her death? As Abbey struggles to understand Kristen's betrayal, she uncovers a frightening truth that nearly unravels her -- one that will challenge her emerging love for Caspian, as well as her own sanity.

I was really excited to read this trilogy. So far though, it's a little disappointing.  The whole idea of the legend of sleepy hollow, the mysterious death of the main character's best friend, Kristen and Caspian, the guy that starts appearing at the same time as Kristen's funeral, all sounds like an amazing story. Only, I felt like a lot of the pages in this book were filled with a lot of words, just to fill a page.

I feel like the author didn't really know where she was going with the story as a hole, and just wrote from the top of her head, while trying to string along a few events here and there to make the readers feel like something was actually going to happen. So many times while reading this, I kept thinking, Can we just get on with it already? I want to know what happens with this! Yet it generally dragged on for 4 or 5 pages, and you never really would get any real clue. For instance, when Abby found Kristen's  diaries, and read them, I thought, Wow, we're actually finally starting to get somewhere with this. Boy was I wrong!  It talks about some of the diary entries, but then sort of just moves on to something different and your right back where you started.

Another thing that got on my nerves was Abby. She's one of those most dumbest, annoying characters I think I've ever come across. She cries over everything, she makes friends with old people that live in the cemetery, gets upset every time some little thing happens, or Caspian didn't kiss or touch her the way she wanted, etc. 

In reality, this book should have really only had 200 to maybe 300 pages at most. When you take out all the "filler", that's about what you would have left of actual story, not 500. Jessica Verday could have definitely made the story a whole lot better.