The Cove by Claire Rose

The quick cut: A girl who's been kicked out of another prep school is shipped to her uncle's house for the summer and finds herself in the middle of a string of deaths. 

A real review: 

 Thank you to Wednesday Books for providing the arc for an honest review.

 We all have our problems, but it's difficult to tackle them when you do not have an effective support system. For seventeen year old Lindsay, this is the case when she gets kicked out of yet another prep school. 

 Lindsay is used to being ignored, especially since her parents have always been too busy for her. With a mom who is in politics and a dad who is busy with business, they send her a driver anytime she needs to be sent somewhere else. When her most recent prep school kicks her out and instead decides to give her a second chance in the fall, her parent's driver arrives to take her back home. Or at least she hoped that they would be going back home. Instead she is driven to a small town of Marbury, Maine where her uncle and his new wife are living. Instead of spending the summer free in the city, she's stuck doing farm work in the middle of nowhere and without a cell phone signal. Will she survive the summer? Or will something drag her down instead? 

 This book was interesting as a premise, but the final result left me conflicted. While I like the characters, the direction that they're taken in via the plot leaves me feeling unsatisfied. I like the plot as a whole, but it feels like it would be better suited as two different books rather than the one it is. The very frenzied ending definitely did not help with the conflicted feelings either. 

 Lindsay has uninterested parents who truthfully never should have had kids in the first place. Rather than actually caring about the daughter they brought into the world, they spend their time focusing on their careers. This leaves Lindsay doing inappropriate and insane things in order to get attention, including never going to classes. Considering this isn't her first prep school to be kicked out of, it shouldn't be a surprise that it happens again. All the girl wants is to be shown some care and attention like everyone else. Life doesn't have as much meaning without others to share it with. If I was as ignored as Lindsay, I probably would've done similar things too. 

 A primary focus of the plot is on her uncle's farm and the strange deaths that seem to keep happening. Seashells, missing memories, and bodies appearing in places they shouldn't with a lot more blood than you would expect. It's gruesome and definitely not a story I would recommend for the younger end of the young adult audience. The horror in this story is not minor and it definitely makes sense that it gets compared to Midsommar that way. 

 I enjoy horror stories, but the beginning of this book feels more like a contemporary story to me. The ending gives you a satisfying feeling from a horror story stance, but there isn't a sense of resolution about what Lindsay has endured. Not truly. That lack of closure is going to bother me for quite some time. 

 An interesting horror story with a lack of closure for the character. 

My rating: 3.5 out of 5