Dead Voices (2019) by Katherine Arden ⭐⭐⭐⭐
I read the kindle version of Dead Voices. I liked the first book in this series, and when I discovered that this series is a quartet, I decided to just read everything Katherine Arden has written. I love the way the stories are told, and there’s a lot of heart in the characters. You actually care about them and what happens to them, which sometimes is hard to pull off with stories of this type and length.
I think this comes from the slow reveal of the backgrounds of the characters. The last book came only from the point of view of Olivia Adler, nicknamed Ollie. This one comes from a dual point of view. Sometimes we are with Ollie, and sometimes we are with Coco. We don’t really know much about Brian except that he is of Jamaican heritage, likes to read, and is a sports hero in school. I’m hoping we get the point of view of Brian in the next book.
While I enjoyed the last book, I really liked this one. It centers around a haunted ski lodge which used to be an orphange that has a sad and frightening history attached to it. The ghosts are spooky, and the way the ghostly children are described is fantastic. Coco embarks on a race against time to save her best friends from certain fate. Remember – Don’t look into the mirrors and stay away from closets! Oh, and Don’t listen to the dead voices!
Parts of this will pull at your heartstrings. You can really feel the love that the three have for eachother. It’s a certain bond of bestfriendship that only comes once in a lifetime.
I have one criticism about the book, so if you don’t want to know too many details or read any major spoilers, skip the next block.
Ollie and her father, Coco and her mother, and Brian arrive at the ski lodge that evening. They were the only group that arrived of the ski lodge’s many reservations due to the storm on the rise. On the first morning, they see that there will be no skiing to be done today because of the terrible storm. While they are eating breakfast, an unexpected visitor without a reservation comes to the ski lodge. His name is Don Voland. He is a ghost hunter, and he has come to investigate the ski lodge, as he had heard that there were supposed to be ghosts there. At one point in the book, Coco, Ollie, Brian, and Mr. Voland start using a Ouija board. Brian is hesitant to use this, as he was brought up Catholic, and was always taught that Ouija boards were of the devil. Brian reads the directions, and there are just four warnings, one being Always Say Goodbye. The Ouija board part starts the whole action block of the story from there on out. Well, of course, everything works out in the end, but —- They never did say Goodbye on the Ouija board, and I kind of thought that was a major oversight by the author. The fact that she put in that whole scene with Brian reading the directions and warnings makes me think that she had this as a plan, but it got forgotten along the way. Or, I could be looking too far into it, and it wasn’t even part of the plan to begin with. I just think it would have been a nice cap on an overall well-conveyed story that kept me hanging on till the very end.
Overall, this is a good book, and I’m excited to see what the next book holds for us. Even though these books are written for 12 year olds, they are definitely good books to read together as a family, There’s something cozy about Katherine Arden’s writing voice, and I’ll be reviewing all of her stuff eventually. She even has things written for adults, and I’m excited to delve into those after the Small Spaces quartet.