Book Review: Lonely Places by Kate Anderson

Lonely Places by Kate Anderson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An atmospheric setting, creepy plot, and guilt combine for a satisfying young adult tale of psychological terror.

Lonely Places is a new young adult psychological horror story by author Kate Anderson, and its rich, evocative setting will have readers jumping in their seats at every unidentified noise. The young protagonist is realistically portrayed, and many readers will easily relate to her and her feelings, effectively edging up the engagement in this absorbing tale.

Chase Woolf is the older sister and narrator of the story. Soon to turn 18, she’s desperately unhappy with her father’s choice of the family’s vagabond lifestyle. She longs for a stable, traditional home, specifically the one from her childhood memories in Boone, North Carolina, where they lived down the street from her paternal grandparents until their deaths. Instead, her father has committed the family to living at a remote fire lookout station for a year. Her goal is to make enough money over the summer and upcoming school year to escape her current life, as well as the guilt she bears for leaving her much younger sister, Gus, behind in the woods at her family’s campsite six months earlier and the young girl’s resulting trauma. Lost for hours, when the family finally found Gus, she was tear-streaked and terrified and hadn’t spoken a word since, except to mumble to herself and now the trees that surround the fire lookout station their father has brought them to for the coming year.

The setting in remote Utah in the middle of the Pando Aspen Grove, a real location, is vivid and creepy and plays a main role in the unfolding tale. The slow reveal of past issues at the fire lookout station are eerie twists that serve to intensify the growing suspense as Chase watches her younger sister start to spend more and more time in amongst the trees, collecting the myriad bones she finds, slowly fading away from the young sister she knew and changing for the worse. As a parent, I wanted to shake the girls’ parents; both of these girls needed more help than a change of scenery or just ignoring it could provide. In addition to the unique and compelling mysteries of what was going on at Pando, there is the start of a normal romance for Chase at the nearby summer camp.

The author’s easy-to-read writing style, evocative setting, vulnerable protagonists, and slowly simmering suspense of the story kept me interested and invested from start to finish. I recommend LONELY PLACES to readers of young adult psychological horror and thrillers.

I voluntarily reviewed this after receiving an Advanced Review Copy through TBR and Beyond Book Tours.


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