Review: Need (Need #1)
Need by Carrie Jones
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Zara's mother sends her to live with her grandma in Maine in the hope that grandma time will help her recover from grief over her stepfather's sudden death. She has her doubts about leaving temperate Charleston for a tiny, snowy town in Maine, but Zara isn't in the mood to argue. On her first day at her new high school, Zara falls for a muscular, handsome guy named Nick. He also is immediately drawn to Zara. Suddenly, Maine doesn't seem like such a bad place to be. Zara even meets a few new friends and starts a school chapter of Amnesty International, but the more she learns about the local lore, the more she realizes there's something off about the residents of this town. Something dark and evil is at work and it's making boys disappear. Based on warnings from her grandma to stay off the roads and trails at night, Zara suspects that there's a chance that the same evil could make her disappear too.
Carrie Jones's writing in Need was much stronger than I expected it to be; at least for the first 2/3rds of the book. The tension and mystery of what troubles the residents of the town, and voices in the woods kept me reading late into the night, but the ending seemed to play more on shock value than story value. Still, if you're curious about dipping your toes in YA fiction with fairies/pixies that doesn't read like it's in a foreign language, this is a good book to start with. The characters are likable and it's pretty solid up to the last 50 pages or so.