Hidden Company

by S. E. England

[pamela]

Hidden Company was relatively well written but unfortunately failed to meet my expectations. It started weakly, and despite its mostly strong prose, relied far too heavily on cliche. While the setting was well rendered, the characters were weak, without a true sense of who they were. I was halfway through before I realised that Flora George, one of the main characters wasn't a middle-aged woman. She is meant to be nineteen years old, but she was written in a way that made me think she was far older.

At times it felt like Hidden Company had bitten off more than it could chew. It had tried to cram too much into the plot that it lost track of where it could go. It tried to be supernatural, but still have the characters try to rationalise everything. They actively engage with paranormal experiences, but always attempt to rationalise certain things, making the end a bit wishy-washy. It's a shame because the final twist could have been really affecting. It was potentially clever but was betrayed by the poor development of the supernatural elements of the scenes set in the modern-day. Not to mention the fact that is was preceded by one of the worst moments of info-dump I've ever come across. It all amounted to, not a terrible reading experience, but a relatively lacklustre one. I was invested enough to keep reading, but not sufficiently invested not to skim read.

Combined with some glaringly repeated writing mistakes like "speeded" rather than "sped" and "disorientated" rather than "disoriented" I was left thoroughly underwhelmed by Hidden Company. There is also an undercurrent of Anglocentricsm throughout the whole novel. Wales and the Welsh are regularly described as dark, backward, and sinister, while the English protagonist is the one who saves the day and sees things for how they really are. I doubt it was intentional, but it's certainly something I noticed while reading. Then, when the main character said that she "popped a couple of paracetamol" to "send her into oblivion for a while," I nearly threw my Kindle across the room. That's not what paracetamol does, and it was those kinds of mistakes and biases that just came together to make the whole book feel forced.

While Hidden Company may be a good enough read for a rainy day when you have a few hours to spare (and nothing else on your bookshelf), it certainly isn't anything to write home about. It wasn't new. It wasn't original. It was disjointed, had weak characterisation, and had a severely under-developed plot. Thank goodness I got it free on Prime Reading because if I'd paid money for it, I would have been more disappointed than I already am.