Barking Madness by Ryan Hill
Summary
“Seventeen-year-old Rosetta Harper is plagued by nightmares of a masked man. With her father’s new career move, her family has just relocated from Florida, to the small New England town of Ashwood, a quiet town and close-knit community where you know your neighbors, and trouble is a word unspoken. But soon after her arrival, both Rosetta’s world and the worlds of her classmates come crashing down.
Michael hates his family and feels alone and unloved. He only finds comfort when he’s with his friends, but even they get on his nerves. Everything about Ashwood and his life bores him, until Rosetta Harper moves into town. With her as a new classmate, Michael finally gets the excitement he was looking for, but it may be at too high a cost…”
-From Amazon.com
Review
Ryan reached out to me over this book and as a he was a university student like I am as well, I had to give it a go as I was curious and all Uni students want success and I’d love to be a part of that for him. And I’m definitely glad that I agreed to read this book as it was fantastic! It took the regular story of a werewolf and gave it a slight twist which was quite interesting and unexpected.
I would definitely classify this book as older YA because of some of the themes occurring, such as some of the violence, but other than that it was a perfect YA novel! Which was a really nice change for me because I’ve been reading such heavy texts recently as well as adult novels (so the writing is more advanced) and it was nice for the change.
First thing I’ll focus on is the character development, which there was a lot of. I love when there is character development and because there was so much in this, you kept wondering how characters would react to different situations, as they kept developing. You were never sure and so it definitely kept you on your toes.
Next was the general story line. Even until the end I wasn’t sure how it was going to end, because of the character development. You never really knew who would say what and react to each situation.
Now this book is heavy with death and violence, some of which is quite graphic, so if you aren’t necessarily into that type of stuff, then this book isn’t exactly for you. There was also quite a lot of talks about suicide and self-harm, which I want to mention as I know quite a few people get uncomfortable with things such as this within books. There was bullying and teen drinking and all that such, hence why I classify it as mature YA, a genre which it fits perfectly into.
It was a decent length, almost 500 pages, so it wasn’t an excessively long read but potentially a little longer than some YA books.
Also, one of the things which I really liked was that you got to dislike or really hate some of the characters in the book. I love when an author can do that because it makes it more realistic and more fun as well! So that was also really interesting and awesome.
Overall I really did enjoy the book. Click here to purchase it from Amazon and definitely do give it a go and let me know what you think.
Happy Reading!
