Book Review: Penpal by Dathan Auerbach

Title: Penpal

Author: Dathan Auerbach

Release date: June 4th, 2022

Over the years of reading, you get a number of books that are frequently recommended to you. Books that sound great but your TBR is so large that you simply can’t get to them in a timely manner. Such was the case with ‘Penpal,’ one of the most frequently suggested books I read from people I interact with all the time. When it got to the top of my TBR, I was excited and went in wondering just what I was in store for.

What I liked: I’ll be upfront, this was a book that landed directly on the 50% enjoyed, 50% annoyed line. The story follows a man who is looking back on some spooky and horrible events in his life. He wants to come to find out the truth about what happened and as he dives into it, discovers it is way worse than he ever suspected.

It starts out innocently enough – in their kindergarten class they fill out cards, attach them to balloons and release them in the hopes that whoever finds the card will become a pen pal and write back to the student. When our main characters is launched, at first he gets no reply, but soon he does. Someone who is sending him polaroid photos back that appear to be taken of the boy.

The story jumps back and forth a bit through different time periods of his youth and we get some really creepy and frightening moments. There were a few spots that I was beyond unnerved with and loved when things really ramped up.

The ending was sad and allowed for some closure, even if it didn’t completely feel like it.

What I didn’t like: The two biggest things that annoyed me continued throughout the entire story. The first thing was that the age of the characters and actions didn’t always line up. When the kids are portrayed in Kindergarten there are a lot of things they’re doing that would be more accurate or physically accurate if they’d been in grade five or higher. I say this with having a kid in Grade 1 who is smart and a solid guy, but who wouldn’t be doing a bunch of what this Kinder kid is apparently doing. This annoyed me to no end as the book progressed.

Minor spoilers ahead here FYI.

The second was the seemingly lack of any actual action regarding the person doing these creepy things. It doesn’t seem like the police were ever contacted nor informed of anything and trust me, if someone was sending polaroid’s of your kid from a distance repetitively for years, you’d be contacting the police. Let alone if they followed you at night, were living under your crawlspace of your home or drove a car highspeed into your date. It just frustrated me to no end that these things happened and our main character just seemed to always forget about it.

I will add – it could try and be explained away as a ‘small town’ thing. I grew up in a really small town. When something ‘off’ happened, everyone knew and things wouldn’t be swept away like it seems they were here.

Why you should buy this: As always, take my feelings with a grain of salt. You may love this book and rave about this book, but for me it was a miss. If it weren’t for the tension and dread filled moments I would’ve dnf’d it and I almost did following the opening chapter which didn’t do much for me at all.

Overall, I categorize this one as a miss, but you may very well enjoy it and rave about it. In which case – I’m so happy for you! But for me, this wasn’t my cup of tea.

2/5