Book Review: Quinsey Wolfe's Glass Vault by Candace Robinson

Some see it… Some don’t…

People in the town of Deer Park, Texas are vanishing. There is a strange museum, known as Quinsey Wolfe’s Glass Vault, that appears overnight. Perrie Madeline’s best friend and ex-boyfriend are among the missing. Perrie and her friend August go on a pursuit for them in the mysterious museum. Could the elusive Quinsey Wolfe’s Glass Vault have anything to do with the disappearances?

Quinsey Wolfe’s Glass Vault is the start of a thrilling duology full of magic, danger, and romance.

My Review: 
The first thing that caught my eye were the gorgeous covers for both books in the series. I love the use of colour and design and it made me check out the blurb. I thought it sounded interesting despite my recent aversion to YA books, so I decided to give it a try.

Vale loves to torture and kill but now he really wants to bring down humanity. He sets up a new identity as Quinsey Wolfe and overnight, the Glass Vault appears in a town where people start to go missing. Perrie lives with her father, in a house next door to her cousin Maisie, aunt and uncle. Perrie is trying to ignore her ex boyfriend who denies cheating on her despite her seeing him with another woman, and is still coming to terms with her mother running away with another man and leaving her family behind. She is getting close to her new friend and potential new boyfriend August when the story begins.

The Glass Vault has suddenly appeared and the somewhat dramatic Maisie decides that she wants to apply for a job there, despite how weird it is that the building has just appeared in town overnight with no sign of building work going on in the area. When Maisie fails to return and Perrie's ex is also added to the missing list, Perrie is stunned when the police can find no trace of the building ever being there. Perrie and August are able to see it and decide that they need to go in themselves to find Maisie but when they get too close to the Sleepy Hollow exhibit, they find themselves sucked into the real life Sleepy Hollow where the Headless Horseman seeks more victims. Unable to get back out, they are forced to trek through the world and through a barrier into the next exhibit but can they ever find the missing, avoid being killed and get back to the Glass Vault?

I liked the concept of the book. The victims are sucked into an exhibit and forced to re-live scary scenarios involving Sleepy Hollow, Jack the Ripper, the trolls under the bridge and other assorted urban legends and fairy tales. Once inside an exhibit, they cannot exit the way they came, instead having to find where the barrier ends to allow them to move into the next exhibit. They are trying to find the missing as well as the exit, and avoid being killed by whatever lurks in each area. I thought that the idea itself was good and it was interesting to see them go through the fairy tales. I very much enjoyed the menace of the Jack the Ripper exhibit as that part of history interests me. It was pretty well written with a touch of YA horror to it and I was always interested to see what was going to be the next scenario.

My issues came mostly with the characters. I found Perrie to be a bit on the whiny side. I get that a couple of bad things had happened to her but with a new boyfriend in her life, I got annoyed with her continuing to obsess over being betrayed by her ex. I wanted to shake her and tell her to just forget him and move on instead of just going on about it. When she and August are sucked into the exhibit of Sleepy Hollow, instead of feeling fear and terror over this turn of events, they are cracking jokes and arsing around  like a couple of idiots which really annoyed me. If such a weird thing happened to me and I was looking for people I care about, I doubt I'd find anything funny about the situation. I found the characters a bit childish for being around eighteen years old and they appear to be a lot younger in their manner.

Maisie annoyed me even more. She is around eighteen years old but seems to have the mentality of an eight year old. For years she has been wearing an eyepatch and pretending to only have one eye. I don't recall being told WHY she wanted to pretend to be half blind or why nobody in town thinks she is a grade A idiot for doing it. Why didn't the author have Maisie as a character who was blind in one eye instead of pretending to be? That would have made more sense to me. Maisie also fancies herself as a reporter and goes about trying to interview people. I found her manner really irritating and didn't much care when she went missing. I also found the conversations between the girls to be a bit strange and unrealistic at times. 

The book took quite a bit of time to get into the actual plot. It took ninety pages focusing on Perrie's angst and Maisie's stupidities before we get inside the Glass Vault and they then wander around a lot of corridors before we see the exhibits. I also found that the writing style need to be worked on as a few of the sentences made no real sense, sounding more like the author was making up words herself, some of which sounded a bit dumb. The characters felt a bit too childish for their ages for me and I found that I didn't care that much for any of them. I don't think that it is a bad book-it has a lot of good ideas, a solid plot and a few interesting twists along the way but it needs to have a bit of padding removed from the start and a bit of editing and work to tighten it up a bit. It was a decent enough read but I decided not to read the second book.

Read February 2019
2.5/3 stars.