Confessions of a Bookaholic: The Haunting of Brynn Wilder

Brynn Wilder has had a rough couple of years. When her mother was diagnosed with cancer, she put everything on hold - relationships, career, aspirations - to take care of her in the stead of her grief-stricken father. Now that the battle is over, Brynn is left desperately trying to put the pieces of her old life together without the support of her mother. When her friend Kate suggests a getaway to beautiful tourist-town Wharton on Lake Superior, Brynn decides it's just what the doctor ordered. With nothing to lose and everything to gain, she packs up and heads off for the summer to recharge and rediscover her direction in life. Upon arrival, Brynn is struck by the majesty and contentment of life in Wharton; cozy lodgings in a boarding house with a fun-loving, eccentric owner, stunning scenery, friendly neighbors, and enough time to do whatever she wants whenever she wants. Throw in a handsome fellow lodger with a seemingly endless array of mysterious tattoos and things seem like they could finally be looking up... until the voices start.

From the night she arrived, strange dreams and eerie voices plague Brynn in the otherwise idyllic setting. Believing it to be stress, she brushes off the whispers outside her door and nightmares of a strange woman in one of the other rooms. After all, it could just be other lodgers in the hallway and she can't really be dreaming of a room that's been locked and unopened since she arrived, especially not when the dream also comes with a woman she's never seen before. As time goes on, Brynn discovers there might be more to her experience than meets the eye. The boarding house has a reputation for being haunted, even more so after an unknown woman was found dead in the now-locked room when the lodgings reopened for the tourist season. Although perturbed, Brynn finds herself spending more and more time with the magnetically handsome Dominic and soon starts to feel he's the cure to one of the wounds she came to heal, in spite of the rumors circulating that he's not what he seems. She also finds herself frequently in company with Alice, a woman with Alzheimer's who is being cared for by one of the other lodgers. Despite her confusion, Alice seems to be almost clairvoyant and it quickly becomes apparent that her statements are more than just the ramblings of someone living with the disease. As Brynn's nightmares begin to blur the line between waking and sleeping, she starts to suspect that one of the house's more otherworldly inhabitants is trying to tell her something about her past, something that both Alice and Dominic seem to be involved in. Together, they must reveal the secrets the visions hold and uncover Brynn's true past.

Okay, so imagine you have a craving for chocolate chip cookies, except you can't bake so you have to run to the store to get them. You grab a package off the shelf, get home, open those bad boys up, bite into one.... and discover it's oatmeal raisin. You HATE oatmeal raisin (because you are a decent human being). That's about how this book was for me. In fact, this was my actual face when I finished it:

I loved Webb's Daughters of the Lake, so I naturally assumed that something by the same author with an equally lovely cover would be just as fabulous. This has taught me a valuable lesson about assumptions. It started out really strong and I was doing whatever the bookish equivalent of chugging is to find out what happened, but I started to get this sinking feeling in my stomach the closer I got to the end. When there were, I kid you not, 10 PAGES LEFT and literally nothing had been resolved, I knew this whole thing was about to go down the drain like last month's expired milk. And it did, in an extremely bizarre fashion. Although there admittedly was a hint or two that something of this nature was going to occur, the ending was so rushed that it felt like when TV shows find out they're not getting another season so they have to make up some quick resolution and it ends up feeling like the whole show went to the Twilight Zone. In addition to that, the cover and summary lead you to believe it's going to be spooky and it is to a small degree, but definitely not what I was expecting on the spook factor.

The ending on its own would've been hard for me to get over, but I also found the characters to be a little cheesy. They all seem like copy and paste versions of the same character, even Dominic, who's supposed to stand out from the rest of them. They were all "la la everything is so happy all the time and we laugh about everything and life is so wonderful here in this paradise". I almost feel bad saying this but Brynn was one of the worst to me. Not quite the same, she was more "la la I wish I could be happy and laugh all the time and have a wonderful life like everyone else". I was really rooting for her at the start because she does have a tragic backstory, but if I had a dollar for every time "her eyes filled with tears" over EVERY. SINGLE. THING, I could retire and move to Scotland to spend the rest of my days eating haggis and wearing outfits composed of nothing but tartan patterns. Everyone seemed almost cartoon-like; there in a basic outline, but lacking the detail needed to really flesh them out. And I just realized Daughters of the Lake was also set at Lake Superior?? Overall, it was a pretty good read up until the end and I didn't hate it, but I'm iffy on whether or not I'd want to read it again.

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