Release Date: September 25th 2012
Published By: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Pages: 320
Goodreads: Add it to your reading list

Rating: 5 out of 5

Synopsis: Katie is on the verge of her Rumspringa, the time in Amish life when teenagers can get a taste of the real world. But the real world comes to her in this dystopian tale with a philosophical bent. Rumors of massive unrest on the “Outside” abound. Something murderous is out there. Amish elders make a rule: No one goes outside, and no outsiders come in. But when Katie finds a gravely injured young man, she can’t leave him to die. She smuggles him into her family’s barn—at what cost to her community? The suspense of this vividly told, truly horrific thriller will keep the pages turning.

Review: Simply put, this was one of the best reads I had in 2012. If you love horror like I do, you will love the original and fast paced story. There is so much more to this book than the horror aspect, and this is the reason why I loved The Hallowed Ones so much. It’s a book of substance. It has a big element of romance and relationship themes throughout, apoloyptic style action and then there is the ‘vampires’, although I tend to think they were more zombie-ish personally.

As I said before, this is truly an original story. Armish meets vampires. It’s told in a way that you could actually imagine happening… an explosion hits the USA and biological warfare hits, spreading a disease that sends people into a violent frenzy - killing each other and tearing apart everything in site. And if they die… sometimes they come back as one of the vampires to cause more chaos.

Armish girl Katie is our protagonist, and I found her to be truly likeable as a character. She was a little rebellious and didn’t want to just settle for an answer, which the rest of the Armish folk did. She was a strong female, which isn’t seen in her community very often and I think she has a lot of questions about her faith. She has always felt she will marry Elijah, an Armish boy she has grown up with her whole life. They are planning on spending their Rumpspringa together (which is their opportunity to live outside of the Armish community and see what lifestyle they want to choose), but everything changes when they receive news that things on the outside have changed, and the world is being torn apart.

Alex was a great character I felt. He is an outsider that finds refuge on Armish property after almost being killed by one of the vampires. Katie, after being told not too, decides to give him refuge and nurses him to health. Turns out he is all sorts of awesome. PS. I am totally crushing on Alex. He was everything you would want in a YA novel. Smart, witty, a bit nerdy (Loved the Wonder Woman references), he gave Katie the cute nickname of Bonnet, and the fact that he was both sexy and tattooed I think topped it off for me. Alex is my kind of guy! Meeting Alex makes Katie question a lot of things about Elijah, namely how she feels for him.

The writing flowed like a movie in my mind, it was very fluid and I could see it all unravel in front of me as I read. In that way, it was one of those books you could just polish off in one reading. I really appreciated the amount of research that went into the Armish community. Having seen a number of documentaries on the Armish in the past, I felt like everything I read was really consistent and realistic to what I know about them. I think it was this that added to the realism of the whole concept, dispite the book being about vampire like creatures, in my mind, I was thinking…. you never know, something like this could totally happen in the future!

Cannot wait for book number two! Don’t miss this one!!

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