Hollow Earth (Hollow Earth, #1)

by John Barrowman and Carole E Barrowman

[Nessa Luna]

Read this review, and many more on my blog October Tune!

Honestly, one of the reasons I was interested in this book, was because it was co-written by John Barrowman, who most of you might know from either Doctor Who, Torchwood or Arrow. Then, of course, I read the summary and I thought it sounded interesting, so that is the reason I eventually bought it.

The first thing I noticed, was that this book has a map of the island the twins and their mum are staying on, which is something I really like – because sometimes I find it hard to imagine the place in which the book happens; because of the way people describe it, so with this book I often found myself flipping back to the beginning of the book to see where the people in the story were at that moment.

I also really liked the concept; being able to animate yourself into paintings, or having your drawings come to life. I mean, who wouldn’t want that? Okay, maybe the whole ‘scary things appearing when you’re scared’ thing isn’t really that awesome (I mean, spiders the size of a cat, no thank you!), but the rest is really something I would love to be able to do!

There were some parts in the book where I wasn’t 100% sure what exactly happened, and I had to re-read that part again to understand what had happened (and sometimes after re-reading it I still didn’t understand it), because so many things happened all at once, and the POV’s kept changing and telling the same part of the story again, so that was a bit annoying. There was also one character who had a Scottish accent, and her dialogue was written that way, which is something I find annoying, an accent being written down (like Hagrid’s in Harry Potter). Because sometimes I just don’t get what they’re saying.

I gave this book three planets, because though I couldn’t really relate to any of the characters, and some parts were a bit confusing to me, I did really enjoy this book, and I am definitely going to read the second one, because I just really want to know what happened! I can’t really handle it when a book ends in a ‘cliffhanger’ (though this wasn’t really a proper cliffhanger, but still, not everything that happened in this book was solved).