📖 BOOK REVIEW⠀📚 Hidden Pictures
AUTHOR: Jason Rekulak @jasonrekulak
Publisher: Flatiron Books @flatiron_books
Stars: ⭐⭐⭐⭐1/2 + 🐰
Published: May 10, 2022
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The Review 📚 Hidden Pictures
✨ This book is slowly making it’s way around the book community, and sounded very intriguing.
💜 This book was a fast read, with paranormal elements. I devoured it. There were twists I didn’t expect, and the main character was very sympathetic. It’s the story of a nanny and the child she looks after. But then, weird things start happening.
💥 I loved this book and would have given it a full 5 stars, except I reserve that for books I would read again. After knowing the twists, I don’t think this would have the same impact.
My face at the end: 😱
I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own. Received from @Netgalley and Flatiron Books.
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📘 Summary 📚 Hidden Pictures
From Jason Rekulak, Edgar-nominated author of The Impossible Fortress, comes a wildly inventive spin on the classic horror story in Hidden Pictures, a creepy and warm-hearted mystery about a woman working as a nanny for a young boy with strange and disturbing secrets.
Fresh out of rehab, Mallory Quinn takes a job in the affluent suburb of Spring Brook, New Jersey as a babysitter for Ted and Caroline Maxwell. She is to look after their five-year-old son, Teddy.
Mallory immediately loves this new job. She lives in the Maxwell’s pool house, goes out for nightly runs, and has the stability she craves. And she sincerely bonds with Teddy, a sweet, shy boy who is never without his sketchbook and pencil. His drawings are the usual fare: trees, rabbits, balloons. But one day, he draws something different: a man in a forest, dragging a woman’s lifeless body.
As the days pass, Teddy’s artwork becomes more and more sinister, and his stick figures steadily evolve into more detailed, complex, and lifelike sketches well beyond the ability of any five-year-old. Mallory begins to suspect these are glimpses of an unsolved murder from long ago, perhaps relayed by a supernatural force lingering in the forest behind the Maxwell’s house.
With help from a handsome landscaper and an eccentric neighbor, Mallory sets out to decipher the images and save Teddy—while coming to terms with a tragedy in her own past—before it’s too late.