Thief of Camorr

‘The House at the End of the Street’ by Lily Blake is a novelization of the movie starring the cute and quirky Jennifer Lawrence.The novel starts with Elissa and her mother moving to a new town, into a house that happens to be next to one that went through something terrible quite a few years ago. The daughter killed her parents in their beds and then disappeared, assumed dead, leaving only her brother (who was away at the time) as the remnant of the family.He seems nice, a little socially awkward, but when the town is so cruel to him, Elissa can understand why he would be that way. She wants to help.Elissa’s mother however, isn’t so sure and tries to interfere, which only pushes Elissa closer to their neighbour – something she may come to regret as the town’s hatred for the boy only increases, and Elissa begins to find out more than she could ever want to.We know what to expect with these novels somewhat – they’ll lack a little description and the plot will be ‘then this happened, then this, then they went over here’ as it vaguely assumes you’ve seen the movie. However, this book wasn’t entirely awkward to read – being written in a way where certain scenes appear vividly in your mind.The characters could have used a little more depth and description. You have the girl and her mother, the neighbour and the bully, and everyone else fades into almost nothing. If the time had been taken to buil—oh, wait, there was a band, too, wasn’t there? I had already forgotten. Perhaps if the time had been taken to build them all into something relatable and believable, the weight of the plot and twists could have drown the reader more into the fear factor.Sadly it falls a little flat, but that doesn’t mean I couldn’t put the book down until I knew what happened. As far as plots go it was different to what I have previously read, which earns it a star in my view, and I couldn’t find any plot holes which can often happen in the thriller genre.This book is quite a lot better than Blake’s ‘Snow White and the Huntsman’ novelization, and I would like to see what she could do with her own original works. Perhaps when not bound by the movie franchise, she would be able to really shine.Review posted here: http://sentientonline.net/?p=3719