Category Archives: Re-Reads

Reviews of books I’ve read before

Re-Read Review: The Burning (The Fear Street Saga #3) by R.L. Stine

27 Sunday Aug 2023

Posted by in Re-Reads, Reviews

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , ,

This is part three of a three-part review of The Fear Street Saga by R.L. Stine. Click here for part 1, The Betrayal. Or click here for part 2, The Secret.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Fear Street Saga 3: The Burning was the first book in this trilogy that made it into my greasy little kid hands. I was in the fourth grade at the time, and that month our teacher assigned us a book report that could be about any book we wanted. I turned in 4 handwritten pages, front and back, that were essentially just a very detailed, bordering on plagiaristic, summary of the whole Hannah and Julia plot arc. It was the most tragic and horrifying thing I’d ever read. I was completely obsessed.

Fun fact: Ever since then, the song “(I Just) Died in Your Arms” by Cutting Crew has reminded me of this book.

The final Fear Street Saga book, The Burning, follows Simon Fear as he debuts in New Orleans with a new name and a new ambition to bring the freshly-christened Fear family back to its former glory. When he sets his sights on the rich and glamorous Angelica Pierce, he knows the only way to win her is to use the terrific powers of his ancestors to remove anyone who stands in his way. Later on, Simon’s daughters Hannah and Julia struggle to come of age in the high society of their new town, Shadyside. But being a teenager isn’t easy when the strings are being pulled by the unseen hands of their family’s curse… Then, Daniel Fear tries to reconnect with long lost family in Shadyside, only to find himself falling in love with Nora Goode. They know that only a marriage between them can unite their families and end the curse. But will Simon Fear allow it?

Some of the tropes in this book:
Gold Digger
Artifact of Doom
Rich Suitor, Poor Suitor
Hereditary Curse
Murder by Mistake
Let the Past Burn
The Cassandra

I loved cracking open this book and immediately jumping into my favorite part of the whole trilogy: The whole plot arc of Simon trying to win over Angelica. Perhaps it’s because it was my introduction to these books, but even reading it now I found it to be the most fun segment out of all three novels. The ballgowns! The Opera! The horrific deaths! I also love Angelica’s glamour and mystique, and wish Stine had done more with her in the latter half of the book.

As mentioned in the intro, the segment with the sisters in the second half of the book blew my preteen mind. I still enjoyed it in this reread, though their “awkward boring sister vs. charming beautiful sister” dynamic didn’t land as well for me this go around. Part of this is because of the characterization of the sisters—like geez, everyone’s thoughts about Julia are so mean!—but I think another part is how it begins from Julia’s point of view, then switches to Hannah for the remainder. I feel I would have preferred it if the viewpoint had either switched back and forth between them more consistently, or just stuck with one sister all the way through.

Also, why don’t we get to find out what happens with Elizabeth Fier from the last book? She’s the POV character for around 1/4 of The Secret, but the only thing we learn about her after that book is that she gave Simon the evil Fear family pendant at some point before he left their home for New Orleans. Please, Jovial Bob, couldn’t we get just one measly paragraph about Elizabeth for continuity?

And another thing: A Fear tries to marry a Goode to break the curse AGAIN?!? That’s three times in three books! In so many generations of Fears, can’t we see one of them come up with a slightly better or at least different idea for breaking the curse?

With all it’s faults, though, The Burning still kills it with the pacing, ambience and action that makes these books so enjoyable. Simon holding his dying daughter in his arms is the image that haunted me the most when I read these as a kid, but others such as the riverboat scene and Simon and Angelica drinking blood together were perhaps even more fun to experience as a grownup.

I still have that original copy of The Burning that I got from the grocery store. The front cover is missing. The spine is unreadable, but still in one piece. Of all the books I’ve lost and donated and “lent” over the years, I’ve never been able to let go of this one.

This is the book that cemented my love of reading late into the night, promising over and over that I’ll go to bed after this next chapter. Of reading something terrifying when I’m alone, something that makes me suspicious of the darkness around me so that I shiver and in a burst of energy get up to turn on all the lights. It’s because of this experience that I went on in my teenage years to seek out incredible horror writers like Anne Rice, Stephen King, Bram Stoker, and so many more.

Four stars for The Burning, and a strong recommend for young people who are just starting to dip their toes into horror. While this trilogy isn’t by any means the best preteen horror out there, it’s a bone-chilling romp that makes a great gateway to the genre.

Did you read The Fear Street Saga as a kid? What were your thoughts then vs. now? I can’t wait to hear what you think, so leave me a comment below!

Re-Read Review: The Secret (The Fear Street Saga #2) by R.L. Stine

20 Sunday Aug 2023

Posted by in Re-Reads, Reviews

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , ,

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐+

The Secret, the second entry in R.L. Stine’s trilogy The Fear Street Saga, continues the origin story of the curse placed on the Fear family. If you read my last post on The Betrayal, then you’ll know that I found this series as a young kid—I was just nine years old, probably a little young for the level of juicy terror and gore peddled by Stine in this series. But I was hooked into the suspense and drama of it all, and age restrictions weren’t going to stop me.

Perhaps being below the intended age bracket is part of the reason this trilogy was so impactful for me. The Secret in particular shook me with its dark imagery and tragic characters. Of course, reading it as an adult has been a completely different experience. Its flaws are much more apparent to me now, but interestingly I enjoyed this one more than The Betrayal this time around, even though previously it was the opposite.

In The Secret, Ezra Fier is hot on the trail of the villainous Goodes when he and his family arrive in a town that’s been gutted by a terrible plague. In a place with so much hate and death, it doesn’t take long for the curse to find them… Jonathan survives Wickham Village and falls in love with Delilah, a preacher’s daughter. If being with her feels so good, then why do bad things happen seemingly from the moment they meet? Then, Elizabeth Fier unearths her ancestors’ mysterious amulet the same day a handsome drifter is welcomed into her family’s home. When she and her sister both catch feelings for the charming Franklin Goode, they have no way of knowing that their fates are already entangled with his.

Some of the tropes found in this book:

Moves Around A Lot
Hereditary Curse
Feuding Families
Artifact of Doom
Sins of Our Fathers
Ghostly Goals
Sibling Triangle
Bewildering Punishment

Right off the bat, The Secret comes in hot against the backdrop of a premium horror setting: a town with corpses as its only remaining inhabitants. Yes, corpse-ridden ghost town, let’s gooooooooo!

I also enjoyed that this book had a character with a longer POV. Even though The Secret is the shortest of the three books, Jonathan is the character we stick with the longest in the whole trilogy, clocking it at a whopping 91 pages from his viewpoint. Unlike other characters up to this point in the series, we see Jonathan survive, learn and grow. The character development in these books, short and fast-paced as they are, is pretty minimal. So it’s nice to have a character who is a little more filled-out.

Another strength this book had over The Betrayal was female characters who actually did interesting things that contributed to the plot. Jonathan’s sister Abigail takes it upon herself to drag her brother to explore the ghost town and lay some of the corpses there to rest, unwittingly unlocking a mystery that will unleash untold horrors on her family. Delilah also ends up being quite a bit more manipulative than she seems at first blush. Chicks in this book are taking charge, and I am here for it.

**SPOLER-RIDDEN RANT WARNING**
Skip the following three paragraphs if you want to remain un-spoiled for The Secret

Unfortunately this novel reaches a premature climax with the ending of part two. The third and final part is more or less a re-skin of the last part of The Betrayal. There are differences, but the moving parts are mostly the same: An unsuspecting family of Fiers, a handsome drifter concealing murderous intent, and a lone survivor to carry on the grudge.

And then there’s the absolutely mystifying way that part two of the book ends: the curse just…stops for 100 years? Apparently all the Fiers needed to do to stop the curse was…get rid of the pendant that literally has the word EVIL engraved on it?? Like, not even destroy it, just hide it really well??? Part 3 starts with a new family of Fiers, Jonathan’s great+ grandchildren, living a prosperous life of blissful curse-ignorance. I get that Stine needed to move the plot forward in time quickly, because it’s a long way from the 1740s to Nora’s framing device in 1900. But there has to be a better way to get there than just hiding the macguffin like a toy from a dog, then rebooting a plot it seemed I’d just read in the previous book.

And last gripe I swear: Where the heck did Franklin “The Last of the Goodes” Goode come from? I feel like Stine could have graced us with at least a page or two of backstory as to what’s been going on with the Goodes for the last 100 years for this dude to still be carrying a grudge when no one else seems to remember what he’s mad about.

**END SPOILER ZONE**
The rest of this article is spoiler-free

Though all that may make it sound like I really disliked the final part of this book, it was…fine. Reading about two sisters competing for the affection of a mysterious newcomer was actually fairly fun. And all together, I do think I enjoyed this book a bit more than The Betrayal. Images like a mother chasing the blue-ribboned hat of her dead daughter, and a knitting needle sticking out of someone’s chest have lived on in my brain since I first read these as a child, and they don’t disappoint today.

Overall, The Secret gets a 3.5 star rating from me. While it suffers from many of the same flaws as the first book, like weak dialogue and characters on mystifying plot rails, I enjoyed the characters in The Secret quite a bit more and actually felt bad when the horrors of the curse befell them. It also does a great job setting things up for the third and final book, The Burning. Number three is the strongest of the trilogy, in my (perhaps somewhat biased) opinion, so keep an eye out for my next review in which I dish all about it.

What did you think of The Secret, or The Fear Street Saga as a whole? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Re-Read Review: The Betrayal (The Fear Street Saga #1) by R.L. Stine + A Reintroduction

13 Sunday Aug 2023

Posted by in Re-Reads, Reviews

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , ,

Before we dig into this Fear Street Saga review, a reintroduction is in order. If you’ve been here before, you may notice some big differences, like the name Adequate Squatch Reads. The old name (Mal Has Bookworms) didn’t really seem to fit anymore (and honestly, was a little bit gross). After a lot of deliberating and weeding out of name ideas that were already taken, I settled on Adequate Squatch because it sounded cool, and because it seems accurate to how I often feel as I move and exist in the world—like I’m a bit of an oddball, but one who’s doing a pretty okay job of blending in.

If this is your first time visiting, hello! I’m Mallory, a food-motivated Gemini who lives in the Midwest and really enjoys a good book or three or seven. I’ll be posting reviews and other book-related content. Check out my Reviews page to learn about my book review standards, and feel free while you’re there to browse my archive of old posts.

If you’re a lover of books, too, then come interact with me about them on social media! Follow @adequate_squatch on Instagram, or click here to be my friend on Goodreads. I can’t wait to talk smack about books with you! ^.^

ANYWAY. On to the reason you probably came here.

A Review of The Betrayal by R.L. Stine

betrayal

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐

I recently came into a lot of Fear Street books.

fear street

Combing through these gems, I was incredibly psyched to get the opportunity to revisit one of my formative reading experiences: R.L. Stine’s The Fear Street Saga.

I read this trilogy out of order the first time around. I was nine years old and already a Goosebumps afficionado, with a few Fear Street books under my belt as well, when I first found a copy of The Burning (Book 3) in the little books and magazines section of the supermarket. It promised to be the origin story of the evil that plagued the citizens of Shadyside. The evil that made 99 Fear Street uninhabitable (for the living, anyway). The same evil that had possessed those cheerleaders! I HAD TO KNOOOOOOOOW!

I took that book home and devoured it. Then I immediately went back to the beginning and read it again. I couldn’t get it out of my head. It had everything I wanted in a story: a generations-spanning curse, forbidden love, fashion, betrayal, witchcraft, and people dying in all sorts of horrific ways. As soon as I could, I found the nearest willing adult to take me to the Tyrone Barnes & Noble to snag the first two books.

Upon finishing the entire trilogy, verily did I become shook. I’d never read something so haunting, violent and all-encompassingly dramatic. It was a shot of Miracle Gro to my budding horror fascination. As horror and its adjacent media genres are basically 60% of my personality today, it’s clear that I owe a lot to these books. Seriously revisiting them as an adult seems like the least I can do.

I had originally planned for this to be a single review for the whole trilogy, but it turns out I have a lot of opinions about these books. So this will be a three-part review, with one post dedicated to each book. Come along with me as I dig into the first book in this series: The Betrayal.

The Fear Street Saga (Subtitle: …where the terror began) was a young-adult horror trilogy by R.L. Stine. In it we meet Nora Goode, the last survivor of the fire that swallowed the Fear mansion. Nora knows of the horrific origins of the Fear family and the curse that has rained misery down upon its descendents. She knows about their legacy of evil and misfortune, and that it won’t stop with death. She knows the story must be told to prevent further tragedy.

The Betrayal tells the story of Susannah Goode, a young 17th century settler who has the misfortune of falling in love with Edward Fier. When Edward’s father Benjamin accuses Susannah and her mother of witchcraft, it sets in motion a chain of events that lead to a horrific curse that the Fiers can never hope to escape. Fleeing town and settling far away on a new farm can only keep the evil at bay for so long. Will Mary Fier be forced to pay the price for her family’s sins?

Note: This trilogy is not to be confused with the Fear Street Sagas, a 16-book series that Stine wrote after The Fear Street Saga. It also tells haunting tales of the Fear family and its curse, but they’re not in chronological order and there is no framing device tying them together.

Some of the tropes found in this book:
How We Got Here
Secret Relationship
Child Marriage Veto
Burn the Witch!
Artifact of Doom
Hereditary Curse
Feuding Families

Re-reading The Betrayal was like squeezing into a favorite old sweater: It’s a little small and out of fashion, but it’s so soft, it smells familiar in a really comforting way, and you remember how good you felt when you used to wear it all the time. In those first few chapters I was immediately sucked into the drama of the mansion on fire, the forbidden love between the rich Magistrate’s son and the poor farmer’s daughter, and the witch trial that seemed so maddeningly unfair.

The plot of The Betrayal is stacked with twists, turns and little cliffhangers that keep you turning the page. Then the witch trial arc ends and you realize that what seemed to be the climax of the story is only the beginning. The plot continues, following the Fiers to where they think they’re safe. You then get a front seat to the heart-pumping action as the curse comes calling. It’s just a whole lot of bloody, horrific fun.

I discovered while reading this, though, that while I love the nostalgia, atmosphere and fast-paced action of these books, like that beloved old sweater it’s just something that’s not meant for me anymore. These are 90s kids’ books and it shows. I found myself frustrated by the stiff dialogue, oversold melodrama, and plot-driven twists that made no sense for the characters—stuff that I didn’t really notice as a preteen, but which really stick out now that I’m (marginally, at least) a more mature reader. Things like the hilariously cartoonish evil of Matthew Fier and the artifically inflated drama of pretty much every scene made it tough to immerse myself in this book as much as I could when I was younger.

The handling of the female characters also bugged me. Two of the three POVs in this book are female, but the primary character trait for each of them is that they’re infatuated with a boy. They don’t have much agency of their own, and seem to primarily exist to be victims of the men’s blood-soaked schemes. As those are the actual juicy parts that move the plot forward, it leaves the women feeling like filler characters, only there to be acted upon for the sake of drama and body count.

All that being said, I truly enjoyed reading this book and there are images in it that may haunt me forever. The story of Susannah Goode as the catalyst for the curse that plagues Fear Street to this day is too good to ever forget. The mayhem that overwhelms the unsuspecting Fiers makes a worthy climax for this chilling introduction to the trilogy.

On re-read, this book earns a three-star rating from me. I understand that these are books for teens, but I also know that books for teens can be done way better than this. I would still recommend this as a really fun read for any teen or preteen who’s just starting to get into horror.

Have you read this book? Share your experience down in the comments. Then make sure you come back next week for my review of the second book in this series: The Secret.

Pushing 30 Reading Challenge — His Dark Materials

15 Monday Dec 2014

Posted by in Re-Reads

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , ,

I really dislike Buzzfeed, so I want to make it clear that this post (or series of posts, we’ll see how far I get) is in no way condoning Buzzfeed or their clickbait articles. But a friend referred me to an article of theirs (not an article, actually, a list is more accurate) boasting “65 Books You Need to Read in Your 20s.”  (Not including a link, because suck it BF.)

Well, I’M in my 20s, I thought. Let’s see how well I’ve done on this OH SO ESSENTIAL list of literature. Turns out, not very. I’ve read maybe three books on the list, and most of them I’ve never even heard of. I consider myself pretty well-read, so this made me a little angry. Why did I need to read these books? What was so special about them? I’ll show you, Buzzfeed, I thought. I’ll read all those goddamn books, you just watch, and they’ll probably be stupid anyway.

Yeah, I’m really not sure what I’m trying to prove with this one, but I’ve been cruising through books lately and continually looking for suggestions on what to read.  With a year and a half left in my 20s, it seems like an interesting challenge to take on, at least to see how far I can get.

It just so happened that at the time I perused this list, I was actually re-reading one of the books (a trilogy, actually) that was on it. So if I’m going to document my journey, that seems like a good place to start.

910mw93VxwL._SL1500_

I read Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy for the first time when I was about 14/15. It pulled me in from the first chapter and kept me captivated all the way through to the last sentence. It made me feel emotions I’d never felt before, bringing me the greatest happiness I’d ever gotten from literature while simultaneously breaking my heart into little pieces that I struggled to make sense of in the days and weeks after I finished it. It’s been a favorite of mine since, and I’ve had to rebuy all three books multiple times when they’ve been lost to roommates, friends or relatives with whom I wanted to share the complex joy the story brought into my life.

The narrative of the first novel, The Golden Compass (originally titled Northern Lights when it was published in the UK), follows Lyra, an orphan from a universe much like our own yet notably different in several ways. When her best friend is abducted by a group rumored to be doing terrible experiments on children, she goes to great lengths to rescue him. She befriends gypsy sailors, witches and armored polar bears in a quest that takes her into the secretive, bitter cold of the icy North. On her journey she ends up involved in plans and politics far beyond her comprehension, yet in which she is destined to play an important role. She leaves her own universe in search of answers and (Book #2, The Subtle Knife) ends up meeting Will, a boy who hails from our own world and finds himself in trouble as he searches for clues to the whereabouts of his missing father. The children agree to help each other and find that their objectives have more in common than they ever would have guessed. When Will inadvertently becomes the bearer of a knife that can cut portals into other universes, they gradually come to realize that their actions may have great consequences across many worlds. Book #3 (The Amber Spyglass)…well, a lot happens and I really have no idea how to summarize it without giving spoilers, but it involves journeying to the world of the dead, a mysterious substance colloquially referred to as Dust which has some unknown connection to human consciousness, and a war against (or to liberate) Heaven itself.

I thought, perhaps, that reading it as an older adult (I did read it another time at about 20/21) might not have the same effect it had when I was young. Perhaps my raging hormones and anger at the world caused these novels to affect me much more then than they would now. I was wrong. It was just as heartbreaking this time around, leaving me, as I turned the last page, feeling like I was saying goodbye to my greatest friends.

This is not to say that the books are without flaws. Particularly in the third book, some characters just seem too pure to believable, and their adversaries seem too willing to be bowed by that purity. Plans seem to go too perfectly and dialogue seems, at certain points, too forced or elegant to be genuine. But at no point did these flaws take me out of the story, and they didn’t bother me enough to sully my love for the trilogy as a whole. I really can’t say enough how much I love this story.

Perhaps it seems that I’m ignoring the elephant in the room. The name of said elephant is Religion. These books received quite a bit of criticism for allegedly promoting an atheist, or even anti-theist, agenda. The outrage over this went so far as to have religious groups picketing screenings of the film adaptation of The Golden Compass. It’s true that Philip Pullman is an outspoken atheist and his trilogy contains strong atheist undertones — after all, one of the supporting characters literally sets out to kill God. The church and its priests are constantly working against the protagonists, and their aims and beliefs are portrayed as misguided at best, malicious at worst. Where the main characters are almost too pure, the agents of the Magisterium (thinly-veiled portrayal of the Catholic church) are almost too one-dimensionally evil. Is it still a great story? Absolutely yes. I would say that this is not a book to have your kids read if you’re raising them to be religious, but I think it’s a worthy flip-side to the coin of beloved Christianity-heavy fiction like The Chronicles of Narnia — which I also really enjoyed as a kid. (As a side note, yes I am an atheist, and no that’s not because an impressionable, young version of me read these books — that decision didn’t happen until college and was the result of a lot of study and careful consideration.) More than anything, I think that His Dark Materials encourages the reader to live a good and enriching life, rather than slogging along in anticipation of what might come after.

These books span a lot of time, space and action. They’re about a lot of things, and different aspects of the story evoke different emotions from different people. Some people will say that it’s about vanquishing religion or about finding love in an unlikely place or overcoming your flaws to do what’s right. None of those answers are wrong. I think that for me, at its core, this trilogy is about following your instincts. It’s about friendship, trust, the purest love and the consequences of those absolutely essential things. It’s about living your life with kindness and curiosity, giving it meaning through your own actions. Those are the lessons that I carry with me from my readings of these novels. Honestly, I can’t wait to read them again.

So, if I feel like it I may continue documenting my journey through this list. So check for updates if you’re at all interested. I can make no promises as to the regularity of those updates, or if they’ll happen at all. All I can say is that something might happen, and it might be interesting!