Erin E. AdamsCritiques

This is another Edgar award nominee.
Very well done.
Ostensibly a story about a monster in the woods taking the hearts of young black girls, but really more about fear,hatred and racism.
The author does a great job weaving together the folktales with the real life stories of the dead girls to create a nice creepy atmosphere .She deftly creates a trust no one atmosphere as her protagonists suspicions change and grow until the finale
Especially impressive as this is a nominee from the first novel category

I really enjoyed this book. Facing her hometown to find a long history that is woven into local tragedy. Then add a sprinkle of supernatural elements. I wish the ending was a little stronger but overall I recommend this book.

Someone is killing the black little girls in Johnstown. Every year, on the summer solstice, a black little girl goes missing. Liz, came home for her best friend's wedding. During the reception, she was watching her friend's daughter, Caroline. Caroline ran off and went missing. Liz is determined to investigate what happened with Caroline and all the other missing girls. I had a hard time getting into this book at the beginning. It was a bit slow for me. Towards the middle it picked up and became suspenseful. However, towards the end, it was very confusing. There were so many characters, and it was hard to keep up with who said what and who did what. I did like how Erin tackled racism, sexism, and domestic violence. Her imagery was beautiful as well.

This book was imaginative and creepy. It was so compelling and readable that I carved out extra time in my day to read! Packed with social commentary I can see where some people wouldn't vibe with this, but I loved it. This book is just as much about classism as it is about racism.

The pacing was great. The characters had depth, and the author did a great job making the reader understand where they (the characters) were coming from and therefore made the characters seem more real.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone that likes social horror.

An Edgar Award finalist for best first mystery novel Jackal has many strengths. It has a unique plot with Black girls turning up missing in a wooded area near Johnstown, Pennsylvania over a period of thirty years. Some of the bodies are found missing their hearts. So, that is an attention getting premise and we do ultimately get to the root of the mystery of what is happening. My problem is the almost total lack of all branches of law enforcement in a crime spree this spectacular. The primary sleuths are local private citizens from the area/ Really?

1.5

boring, predictable and just overall bad

This was great, so many social issues touched on without the story being explicitly about them. Horror and mystery, racism and fear, and excellent characters.

I have no idea how this book crossed my radar and why I decided I wanted to read it. I was drawn to the premise that the town had a history of glossing over the disappearance and/or death of black girls and Liz' attempt to get answers for the families. Adams brought in so many threads and I felt that diluted and distracted the momentum. I was invested in the story for most of the book but about 2/3 in, she lost me.

I would characterize Jackal as a horror novel, which is normally not my cup of tea at all. But the author did an amazing job of combining horror/suspense with thought-provoking questions about racism and class differences. Liz, the main character, returns from NYC to the small town she grew up in for a friend's wedding. When the friend's young daughter disappears, parallels are drawn to the unexplained disappearances of other young black women from the town over the years. While clues are dropped along the way, the ending really took me by surprise.

This book really stuck with me, The author did a great job of drawing vivid characters, especially Liz and her mom.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC!

Liz Rocher returns home to the small Appalachian town that she fled many years prior after a mysterious and tragic incident in the woods. Days after she arrives, her best friend’s daughter goes missing which leads Liz down a dark path investigating disappearances that have occurred for decades that just seem to get swept under the rug by the townsfolk. For the first 80% of this book, I was hooked. It was great. The in-between vignettes from the past victims were heartbreaking. I was invested, the writing was sharp BUT then the story just seemed to lose its way the last 20%. It was almost as if it was written by a different author or the scope of the book had changed and no one clued the reader in, hence the 3 stars. This is Erin Adam’s first book and I do look forward to seeing what she writes next! Thank you to NetGalley for the chance to read and review this book!

A Black woman returns to the flood-scarred town reluctantly to attend the wedding of an old friend, but is caught up in a mystery when a girl goes missing - and she learns she's only the latest Black girl to vanish into the woods, one taken on every summer solstice.

For me, this was a mixed bag. I found the narrative voice compelling and the way the setting and its history was explored was fascinating. That said, I'm not a horror fan, and there is a strong element of horror and the supernatural in this story. Certainly the history of white supremacist violence is horrifying, and here the author uses horror to explore the nature of this evil. Interesting, but for this reader it didn't totally work. For horror fans, it would likely be a success.