Fiendish is about a girl called Clementine who lies sleeping inside the cellar of a burned-out house, tangled in leaves, for ten years. When she wakes up, the world has changed. Her mother is dead, her own aunt doesn’t remember her, and her town hates and fears people like her, people who can work magic. And everyone who knows about magic says that a second reckoning is coming.

Confession: I finished the book the night before writing a rough draft of this post, and I already couldn’t remember the protagonist’s name; I had to look it up. And that’s in spite of there being several references to the song “Clementine” in the book. Which is to say that Brenna Yovanoff’s forte is not character, and you will want to look elsewhere for that. Fiendish excels at being hella creepy. Here are some things Fiendish contains:

• an angry small-town religious mob that wants to burn things down
• catfish with mouths full of rows and rows of sharp pointy teeth
• a group of teenagers whose combined power is at substantial risk of destroying the whole world
• a swampy place that responds to (but is not controlled by) the emotions of the boy who rescued Clementine from her cellar; this is fine if the boy is happy and NOT GREAT if he is cross
• blurry, poisonous black dogs that I picture as being like dog-form versions of the smoke monster from Lost, except they excrete a black tarry poison as well as biting and scratching the living shit out of you
• burned-down houses that people still live in

The morning after I stayed up late to finish reading Fiendish all in one go, my mum mentioned that she had seen reviews of Fiendish that decried the lack of agency on the part of the heroine, Clementine. Which: Okay, I can see that, she’s more reactive than proactive. But it didn’t interfere with my enjoyment of what was a wonderfully creepy book, and it’s the wonderful creepiness I come to Brenna Yovanoff for anyway.

The post Fiendish, Brenna Yovanoff appeared first on Reading the End.