Unwept by Tracy & Laura Hickman {review}

Unwept
by Tracy & Laura Hickman
♦publisher: Tor
♦release date: July 1st, 2014
♦hardcover, 272 pages
♦intended audience: Adult
♦series: The Nightbirds, book 1
♦source: from publisher for honest review

Gamin, Maine, is a remote seaside town where everyone seems to know Ellis Harkington better than she knows herself—but she doesn’t remember any of them.

Unknown events have robbed Ellis of her memory. Concerned individuals, who purport to be her friends and loved ones, insist that she simply needs to recuperate, that her memories may return in time, but refuse to divulge what has brought her to this state. For her own sake, so they say.

Ellis finds herself adrift in a town of ominous mysteries, cryptic hints, and disturbingly familiar strangers. The Nightbirds, a clique of fashionable young men and women, claim her as one of their own, but who among them can she truly trust? And what of the phantom suitor who visits her in her dreams? Is he a memory, a figment of her imagination, or a living nightmare beyond rational explanation?

Only her lost past hold the answers she seeks—if she can uncover its secrets before she fall prey to an unearthly killer.

Review: Unwept, for me, was an odd one. I found myself quickly and completely drawn in to the dark mystery of how Ellis lost her memory, the creepy town where everyone is just a little shady, the eerie atmosphere, and finally the touch of fantasy as her nightmares start seeping into her real life. But somewhere along the way, it lost me. And as the ending crept closer, even knowing that this was a planned series and that a conclusion would not be reached (thank you for the warning, Rachel!) I still felt unsatisfied and that the idea behind the story was a bit confusing and muddy. 

As each characters introduced themselves, I was immediately curious about how they fit into Ellis's story. However, I found as the story went along, the extent of each one's cryptic behavior made it really hard to feel invested in any of them. Jenny, Ellis's cousin, was especially annoying to me, constantly childish and pouty. We're sort of left in the dark about what is really going on for a bit too long, which would have been okay if we had interesting players to cling to, but without that connection, I just found it slowed the pacing. Still, several of them take a slow-building turn toward the sinister, which turns the whole thing very dark and macabre. As Ellis starts to have strange nightmares and visions,  and everyone seems to be telling her a different story, her confusion and distrust and certainty that everything is just competely wrong in Gamin becomes palpable. 

Just the sheer need to find out what this crazy town was all about, to be let in on the big dark secret, kept me reading this one until the end. I can't say whether I will give book 2 a chance to clear up some things that I was left confused about (for instance: chapter 1???) or to find out what will happen next to Ellis, Merrick, and the bizarre moth-man. But Unwept was a interesting, eerie reading experience---just one that didn't completely work for me.

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Purchase Unwept:  BN.com  •  BookDepository  •  Indiebound