Review of Buried by Lizzie Strong
This was pretty crazy. If you have read my reviews this year you might notice that I have been complaining about reading a lot of well written books, but I’m just not connecting with them. Funny enough, the opposite was true with this book. Now, I don’t mean that this was poorly written, but it does have its issues and writing bumps. But on the good side, I was just completely entertained. This was that “I’m still stuck in the house on a Covid Friday night but I didn’t mind because of the high entertainment level kind of book”. So I think this was about a 3 star okay or average level quality book, but I had fun so I bumped it up to give it an extra half star.
This is YA horror/paranormal. The horror is more on the gross level kind of horror, then the scary type horror. In fact, this book had more bodily fluids and just a ton of ichor and everything gross, that I have read in a while. This is a YA book but it is very violent and messy so it seems to be more geared towards older teens and adults.
I love books about witches and YA seems to go really well with witches. Give a teenager filled with angst, some magical powers, and you are bound for some good entertainment which this book didn’t disappoint. I’m a big first person fan so I was excited that this book was in it. However, I was surprised to get three main POV’s in first person. I don’t care what author you are or how many books you have written, because that is a big undertaking. I think this is where Strong ran into some of her biggest bumps. I understand why Strong chose to do it, but I think if she would have only done one POV or even just two, I think the book would have flowed better. The three main characters are all pretty unique, but at times (when we are in their head) their voices sounded too similar. It took me way longer than it should have to not get confused as to who’s head I’m in. Luckily, about the second half of the book it feels much better and they all finally feel unique. Which was great when that happened because then I connected to two of them and started to really care what happened.
The pace was a little all over at times for me. Sometimes it seemed to slow way down, and other times I could not turn the pages fast enough. I prefer a more steady build then such an up and down read, but when the book would really pick up, it sure was a ton of fun. Unfortunately, this brings me to another issue I had. There are a lot of action and fight scenes with monster zombie things, all things I love, but sometimes I didn’t exactly know what was going on. I can’t quite put my finger on what was wrong beyond just saying that the action scenes need more detail and clarity. I like to picture the scenes like a movie in my mind, but this movie would get stuck on pause since I could not picture certain things happening. There were also times that the book needed more dialogue tags. Not only are there three main characters, there are also a ton of important secondary characters too. All the characters speaking were sometimes confusing so I would have to stop and reread to try to figure out who actually was talking when. On the good side, I think these are two things that Strong can easily fix for next book.
Speaking of next books, this does end on a cliffhanger. I heard that this was a book one so I was prepared. Lots of big storylines are still open so I hope we get book two soon. I also want to quickly mention that there was no romance in this book, but I see a possible WLW relationship for two of the witches and maybe even an M/F relationship for the third witch. It’s still very early and I don’t really know where Strong will go, but I’m excited to find out.
In the end this was a book that had its share of bumps, but I still liked it. I would recommend this to YA horror fans, if you don’t mind a book that has some issue but that’s big on entertainment. This is not a book to take too seriously; it’s the kind to just have fun with. I will keep my eye out for book two and I hope we get to see Strong growing as an author since there is a lot of potential here. 3.50 Stars.
A copy was given to me for a review.
