Review: The Mystery of Hollow Places

The Mystery of Hollow Places by Rebecca Podos
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was the TAB book club book, so I picked up a copy to read before our meeting.

I'm not sure if I would have decided to read this book if I hadn't had to read it for book club. I'm a person who judges a book by it's cover, and this cover doesn't scream anything to me. I find it quite boring and blah. And even the description is very wordy and doesn't snag my attention that much.

But I'm glad I had to ignore both of those things and read it, because I did really enjoy it. The overall story is not what I was expecting from the cover, and I found myself flying through the novel to see how it ended.

Imogene has always been reading mystery, suspenseful novels since she can remember. Most of those novels were written by her father, so whenever she could sneak one of his very gory novels into her hands, she did it instantly. And when she wasn't reading her father's novels, she was reading Sherlock Holmes, Nancy Drew - you name it, as long as there was a mystery with clues and a detective, she was on it.

So when her father goes missing, Imogene decides it's because he goes to find her mother, who left them when Imogene was 2. Instead of worrying about her father, she decides she's going to find him with the clues that he left for her. Now Imogene is following the path of information she is uncovering one clue at a time, even if some of the things she's doing is not really legal to do...

She gets help from her friend Jessa and her older brother, Chad, who Imogene has had a crush on since 5th grade.

But Imogene starts to uncover some information that she doesn't really want to know about, so she starts lashing out at the ones who mean them most to her. And the final answer she gets to all of her questions leaves her more confused and hurt than she thought would happen.

This was a great mystery novel, but it was also a great understanding of oneself as well. Imogene didn't know all of the truth and that affected how she was holding herself in a certain way. She realized that she may not be okay with some things in her life and that she may need to fix those things in order to be really happy.

I think this is a great novel for all ages and it really makes the reader think. Also, it's a mystery, so many readers may try to figure out the mystery theirselves. Me? I didn't figure it out until it was revealed, so that was refreshing for me :)

Really enjoyed it and I think a lot of readers will too!

View all my reviews