Okiko is a spirit that wanders the world freeing the spirits of murdered children. She was murdered herself, and now she takes the lives of killers and releases the innocent ghosts. One day she meets Tark, a grumpy teen with some pretty weird tattoos. Something evil clings to Tark, but Okiko knows he is not evil. There is a dark spirit inside of Tark, trapped only by the tattoos. Okiko, Tark, and Tark's cousin Callie try to free Tark, without killing him too. The Girl from the Well is filled with the paranormal, evil doll rituals, exorcisms, spirits, and ghosts.
I was pretty torn between a 3 and a 4 star rating on this one. In the beginning of The Girl from the Well I was a little bit put off by the writing style. It starts off in Okiko's point of view with her saying, "I am where dead children go." At first I was like, what the hell does that mean? Once the story moved on a bit everything started to make more sense though. The style of prose was different and it took a bit of time to get adjusted to it. Surprisingly the style of prose ended up suiting the book very well.
The Girl from the Well takes inspiration from a Japanese legend (the same one Sadako/Samara from The Ring was based on) and has a few parts that did remind me of The Ring and The Grudge. Which both of those movies creeped me out, and this book did in a few parts too.
***Side note: Once I went to a haunted house and someone was dressed as the girl from The Ring (which is scary!) and she touched me!! They aren't supposed to touch you! I about died. It turned out the person dressed up as Samara was a guy, and he knew one of my friends that I was with. So he was just trying to say hey to my friend. It was still freaky. ***
So you see this whole creepy girl with long hair covering her face, coming out of wells or dangling from ceilings is a bit scary to me. Which is why I ended up at the 4 star rating instead of 3 stars. I've never read a YA novel that creeped me out at all, and this one did in some parts. So that's worth an extra star to me because I'm a huge horror fan!
I obviously recommend this for fans of The Ring, The Grudge, and other scary Japanese shit.
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This book really does look good. I so need to read it! I need more hours in the day that are just dedicated strictly to reading!
ReplyDeleteI agree with you there. So many books, so little time. I really enjoyed this one. I am a big horror fan, but the horror YA ones never creep me out. This one actually did and I was surprised!
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