Hello fellow bookworms and friends and welcome to my blog!
Today I’m sharing my review of The Hidden by Melanie Golding, which I was lucky enough to receive an ARC of in return for a free and honest review on my blog. So thank you to NetGalley and Crooked Lane Books.
The Hidden was published on the 9th November 2021 and you can read the synopsis on Goodreads here.
Overall rating – 3 out of 5 stars.
I was definitely intrigued by the blurb of The Hidden, it seemed like something right up my street, and to an extent it was…
When I first started reading The Hidden I was really struggling with the multiple POV and chapter set up, it seemed to just be causing unnecessary confusion, almost as if the author was deliberately trying to make us feel confused in our own minds. However, once I got deeper into the story I did (eventually) learn to live with the multiple POV/chapter set up.
From the beginning it was clear that the writing was going to be impeccable, I couldn’t fault the way this book was written at all. The author has a way with words that seem to draw you into the story, with descriptive phrases and paragraphs, and I felt it was so easy to immerse myself into the story and enjoy the writing.
The high quality of the writing also lent itself well to how the author managed to build up the intrigue throughout the story, although at points it did feel as though we were being led on a wild goose chase… The feeling of which was heightened by the multiple POV chapters, it felt like we were being pulled from all sides without any reason or explanation.
I don’t think the characters themselves helped with this feeling, as they were all starkly different and not developed well enough for me to connect with, I felt like they were very nondescript and hard to visualize. Which is a shame because the characters were such a HUGE part of the story, they carried it with their chapters from their POV, so it just would have been nice to have a bit more about them to form a better picture in my head.
It was a real shame as the actual writing quality and the description of the settings were impeccable, it just wasn’t extended to the characters.
That being said, the plot did redeem the book to me somewhat, the individual aspects came together to form a cleverly crafted story that included some wonderful folklore elements, that eventually came to be the main plot of the story. And I have to applaud the plot and the author because I did not see the twist coming at all! I was completely blindsided and had guessed it entirely wrong…
However, it did feel like towards the end of the story it kind of dropped off and was forgotten about, and the folklore just became irrelevant. I also felt that the ending itself was rushed, and I felt let down when I got to the end of the book.
Overall, the writing and the intrigue of this story were what pushed me to rate it 3 stars, as it was actually an enjoyable read, it just had a few aspects that could have been better developed or written to really elevate the book, these aspects were in no way terrible, they just missed the mark in comparison to the other really good parts.
Until next time, Em xxx
What Em's Reading 