This story was about a troubled teenage girl that is having a hard time dealing with the death of a close friend. Her mother can not handle her anymore so she sends her to live in Seattle with her Dad and step-mother. She eventually learns to get along with her step-mother and her step-brother when she discovers she has to deal the haunting of the summer home and her former best-friend. ( )

Review courtesy of Dark Faerie Tales

Quick & Dirty: How lonely are the woods?

Opening Sentence: The first thing I should see is Pop with his belt.

The Review:

This is why I do not like horror stories. They creep the hell out of me and give me nightmares for days (or nights, I guess). I tried to read this book as quickly as possible just so I could get to the ending. But at 400 odd pages, it took a while!

“So this is for real then?” he says.
I nod because I can’t make myself say the words. I want to be casual about this, but it’s hard to make light of the knowledge that you’ve been deemed hopeless by one of the only two people who is never supposed to give up on you.

I can’t say I enjoyed this story because, as a rule, I don’t like scary stories, however if you’re into thrillers and horrors then you’ll love The Bargaining. It is genuinely frightening and gave me that horrible feeling of being watched, so much so that I kept jumping at loud noises!

“And Penny,” she says just before I’ve broken free of the trees. I can’t see her anymore. I can only hear her voice. “These kids, they aren’t playing around, you know. They have something to say. But you know what my dear old mom always used to say. Not all voices deserve to be heard.”

That house near the woods. I can imagine it perfectly, with the mural that keeps moving, and the handprints on the window. The children with the silent screams and that freaky humming song, argh I’m creeping out just thinking about it!

From the beginning I could tell there was more to Miller than meets the eye. Without revealing any spoilers, all I’d like to add is that his story was sad, and the resulting effect was that Miller has a lot of baggage. In another lifetime I think he and Penny could have made a cute couple.

I try to remember anyone ever making me an offer like that. Anyone ever telling me they’d just listen. They’d just let me say it. All of it. Someone who hasn’t heard the back story third-hand, who didn’t know me before I came to Phoenix, who didn’t know me after Melissa Corey. Who didn’t need to see me as something just so they could make sense of the next something I became.

My favourite character was oddly the step brother, Rob. Although Rob doesn’t have a huge role to play, I loved how supportive he was, and he just seemed like a really sweet sibling. Not my usual type of favourite but perhaps in all the horror, it was nice to have someone normal!

I also liked the dynamics of Penny and her stepmother’s relationship. I don’t think I’ve read a book where both parents are alive but can’t seem to help their child, so it’s left up to the stepmother to try and ‘fix’ her. April made an excellent stepmother and I liked how their relationship develops over the course of the story and the horrors they face.

“What? You don’t think it’s beautiful?”
“No.”
“Well, don’t hold back,” she says. I know I’ve hurt her feelings, though I can’t imagine how she would have expected me to feel about this place that means such different things to her than it does to me. She sees the realization of a long-sought fantasy finally fulfilled, the claiming of some real estate ambition she’s fostered from her career’s infancy.
I see the bottom of a deep, deep hole.

A brilliantly written thriller, but I can’t imagine willingly wanting to read this!

Notable Scene:

“I would do a million things differently. I would’ve torn up the letters so Rae could never read them. I’d have never written them in the first place. I’d have stopped being her friend months before that. Years before that. I would’ve erased the first conversation we ever had, and I would have gone on being the freak nobody talked to, but at least I would’ve been a freak who never ruined some girl’s life for no reason or woke up in the desert with my sort-of best froend dead or hated muself so much for all of it months after I should’ve gotten over it. So yes. If I could erase it all, I would. But here’s the thing about ‘would.’ It’s the most useless word in the entire dictionary because it has no place in any point in time. It’s a stand-in for an imaginary space between what might happen and what actually happens.”

FTC Advisory: Simon Pulse provided me with a copy of The Bargaining. No goody bags, sponsorships, “material connections,” or bribes were exchanged for my review. ( )

Grieving and guilty over a friend's death, Penny is not surprised when her mother sends her to live with her father and stepmother, April, but when April takes her to help restore an old house in a dense forest, weird occurences connected to missing children threaten Penny's safety and fragile mental health. ( )

about a little pass a 3. ( )