Hysteria ~ Megan Miranda (earc) review

Hysteria
Walker Children's
February 5, 2013
336 pages
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Mallory knows that she killed her boyfriend, Brian. Everyone else, including Brian's mother, knows it, too. What Mallory doesn't know -- and everyone else wants to know -- is why. At least, she can't remember.

Mallory wasn't charged after it was decided she killed Brian in self defense. Getting on with her life isn't as easy as she might have hoped. Brian's mother isn't ready to forgive or forget and Mallory still feels her boyfriend's presence all around her.

More than ready for a fresh start she leaves for boarding school in another state. Full of new faces, Monroe is supposed to be a new start . . . But Mallory's secrets -- and Brian's presence -- don't seem to have stayed in New Jersey. Neither does death.

Mallory will have to find a way to unlock her memories if she wants to finally prove her innocence to others and herself.


Hysteria is Megan Miranda's second novel, after last year's Fracture. I loved and adored and hearted and squished (I don't know!) Fracture so maybe I had too high of hopes for Hysteria (the cover and paragraph teaser posted somewhere helped, too)? It's not that I didn't like Hysteria, I did. I just didn't love it.

I never really connected with Mallory -- who narrates the entire book, so I never really connected with the book as a whole. Obviously she's skilled her boyfriend, stabbed him, so that could be a part of it. But I've read other novels where the main characters are -- human or paranormal -- killers so I do think its possible for them to be characters I can relate to, connect to.

As the whole truth of what happened the night Brian died remains elusive -- and as it starts to come out, I never found myself pulling for Mallory and truly hoping things would turn out in her favor. That she'd be a good person at the end of it all. At the end of Hysteria.

Despite my lack of a connection with Mallory, once she got to Monroe the mystery of the story picked up. About half way through the novel events happened that did leave me wondering how they would play out and what role the different characters would play in them.

There are enough characters, with enough strange little traits that it's hard to figure out how they all play into things. Or if they do.

This really wasn't a book that I could race through -- though if you connect with Mallory, you just may -- but it has some interesting twists.

Megan Miranda has some really great scenes in Hysteria and her settings in the novel are great. My lack of a connection with the books main character really kept me from getting into the book, but I'm definitely looking forward to Vengeance (Fracture #2). 



Rating: 7/10






thank you to Bloomsbury for allowing me to take part in the tour -- and for the egalley through NetGalley