Book Review: Asylum

With the recent event of dropping my cell phone in a glass of water, I’ve lost my e-reader and the current book I’ve been reading in the process. While waiting on the rice to hopefully do what it is rumored (and recently tested and failed) to do, I needed something else to read. With so many books in my back catalog of things waiting to be read, a friend of mine had just finished Asylum by Madeleine Roux and told me to give it a shot. So I did.

My friend told me it wasn’t what she expected, as she likes really creepy stuff, like I do. Instead it turned out to be a YA novel and, while she was a bit put off by it not being as scary as she’d hoped, she liked it a bit. Of course there’s nothing wrong with good YA fiction, so I decided to give it a shot.

Being that it’s YA, it doesn’t take long to get through the 300+ pages, so I finished it in 2 days. When it started I wasn’t too attached to it, as page after page gave me what I expected, with easily predictable scenarios. But the longer I read, the more I liked it.

It wasn’t creepy to me at all, but it was a fun story. I enjoyed the characters, even if I’ve basically seen them all before in other YA books, and I enjoyed the story, which I’ve seen in a few other YA books. And even though the story played out how I expected, for the most part, it did give me a few nice twists and turns that helped push the story along and keep it fresh enough that I wanted to read more.



The few problems I had with the book were, aside from the predictability and used story, were basic things that I expect from the YA crowd, which unfortunately played out in Roux’s writing. One thing I’ve always had a problem with are people who throw question marks at the end of sentences when they’re not really questions, and there are quite a few of those in the book. Instead of flowing with the story it had me stop and say to myself, “Is that a question, or…?” Then, after a brief sigh, I continued the story.

Also, in parts, it seemed as if curse words were added to make it a little more adult, even though they almost didn’t fit the story. It seemed like a harmless book in the beginning, the first of the “bad” words took a while to show up, and when the first one did it caught me off guard because at that point I didn’t think I would see any, which isn’t a problem, it just startled me. And then they came more frequently.

The book reminded me of The Harrowing by Alexandra Sokoloff, but toned down more and geared more for a younger audience. And not nearly as creepy.

But by the end of the book I was happy enough with it and with the characters that I’m actually looking forward to reading the follow up soon. Plus, I’d like to see more of what Roux can do.

I gave this book 4 of 5 stars on Goodreads.