Book Review | The Luminaries

A perfect book for spooky season reading.

The Luminaries
Susan Dennard

Hemlock Falls isn’t like other towns. You won’t find it on a map, your phone won’t work here, and the forest outside town might just kill you…

Winnie Wednesday wants nothing more than to join the Luminaries, the ancient order that protects Winnie’s town―and the rest of humanity―from the monsters and nightmares that rise in the forest of Hemlock Falls every night. Ever since her father was exposed as a witch and a traitor, Winnie and her family have been shunned. But on her sixteenth birthday, she can take the deadly Luminary hunter trials and prove herself true and loyal―and restore her family’s good name. Or die trying.

But in order to survive, Winnie must enlist the help of the one person who can help her train: Jay Friday, resident bad boy and Winnie’s ex-best friend. While Jay might be the most promising new hunter in Hemlock Falls, he also seems to know more about the nightmares of the forest than he should. Together, he and Winnie will discover a danger lurking in the forest no one in Hemlock Falls is prepared for.

Not all monsters can be slain, and not all nightmares are confined to the dark.

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I had seen this book around a lot lately and after buying it a couple of months ago I decided it would be a great book to settle in with as the nights get colder and darker. This was the perfect mix of escapism and adventure for my current reading mood and I was always eager to get back to the book whenever I could.

The idea of the forest and why the luminaires were there was something I loved. The nightmares were brilliant, a lot of popular mythical creatures but with a scarier edge, and there were drawings included in the book of what some of them looked like which helped when trying to picture them. I wish I understood a little more about how they came to be but I liked that there were different nightmares depending on location and that there is a compendium that is updated where necessary.

One of the most fascinating parts of the book for me is Winnie’s interactions with the nightmares and what she finds in the forest as she stumbles slightly ill-prepared into the hunter trials. I can’t say too much about it in case I spoil it but I will be interested to see when the others will start to take her and her theories more seriously.

There were times I did get a bit exasperated with Winnie, the clicking teeth for example; of which there is a lot in this book; I could have done without, but for the most part I really warmed to her outsider nature. She has been on the fringes of her society and has had to make some bold choices knowing that she does not have the support she needs to follow through on them and I appreciated that she still went for it. She is a flawed character, she makes some decisions that could have costly consequences but she does seem to have her family’s happiness in mind which does redeem her.

I found what was happening between Winnie and Jay quite interesting, there is a hint of something happening but there is also a hint of Jay being a little different than the other Luminaries which could cause some problems. I am excited to see how that plays out in the next book.

One thing that I did struggle with in this book is I felt that every time we would get a big reveal of something, it would then seem as if Winnie had forgotten all about it and in the back of my mind I would wonder why we weren’t chasing down that big reveal. It would come back up but only after Winnie was on her way to do something else which was a little like taking the wind out of the sails before trying to steam ahead. She doesn’t seem to care about one of the biggest reveals but is instead always half-focused on how people are treating her now that she is back in favour. It just seems her priorities aren’t in the right place at the right time.

Having said that I was definitely transfixed in the latter half of the book, Winnie who has mostly survived on pure luck, is suddenly having to deal with things that she hasn’t come across before and isn’t trained for and at least has enough survival skills to make an effort to stay alive. I felt the tension of that in the last trial, which made this part of the book compulsive reading, to say the least, and I am anxiously waiting for the next book.