Thursday, November 30, 2017

Haunting the Deep

Haunting the Deep by Adriana Mather   352 pages

I was so excited when I saw Haunted the Deep in the fiction section of Blogging for Books. I love stories about the sea, and especially,stories about the Titanic. I’ve seen just about every special was has aired regarding all aspects of the luxury liner.

In this story, Samantha (Sam) Mather lives with her father in Salem, Massachusetts. It’s time for the school’s Spring Fling. The theme this year is the Titanic. Chosen not by the students or most of the faculty, Mr. Wardell, an AP history teacher, chooses it because the rest of the faculty can build lesson plans around it, thereby giving students an immersive experience. It seems, to me, odd that a theme would be chose that ends in tragedy rather than something light hearted.

A mysterious box containing a green velvet dress arrives at Sam’s home. When Sam tries it on, she is immediately transported to the ship’s desk. Sure a curse has been put upon her, Sam turns to a goth clique called the Descendants, all direct descendants of witches that hanged in Salem in the 1600s.

While not too deep, the book is confusing in that there the reader must have read author Mather’s first book, How to Hang a Witch, especially when a Revolutionary War-era ghost from the first book keeps popping up. The reader also needed to know the relationship between Sam and Jan, his mother and her father, Vivian the stepmother and others---but those are fond in the first book.

The story lacked tension. While it is labeled horror, there wasn’t much to be scared of. I was also disappointed that there was far less of the Titanic than I had anticipated. For these reasons Haunting the Deep gets 2 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.

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