There's Someone Inside Your House ~ Stephanie Perkins review [@DuttonYR @naturallysteph] #TheresSomeoneInsideYourHouse

There's Someone Inside Your House
Dutton Books for Young Readers
September 26, 2017
289 pages
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Love hurts...

Makani Young thought she'd left her dark past behind her in Hawaii, settling in with her grandmother in landlocked Nebraska. She's found new friends and has even started to fall for mysterious outsider Ollie Larsson. But her past isn't far behind.

Then, one by one, the students of Osborne Hugh begin to die in a series of gruesome murders, each with increasingly grotesque flair. As the terror grows closer and her feelings for Ollie intensify, Makani is forced to confront her own dark secrets.

Somehow, There's Someone Inside Your House was both sweet and creepy. It seems like it shouldn't work: let's be honest, in a horror movie, you might like characters and be pulling for them to come out of it all alive, you might even want them to get a happily ever after together. But the relationships aren't really the focus of the story.

In There's Someone Inside Your House, though, I really liked the characters and they had well written, real relationships. From Makani and her grandmother (and the lack of her parents) to Makani and Alex and Darby - and Makani and Ollie, they are characters you care about, their bonds seem real and you want them to figure out what's happening but to stay safe while doing so.

The novel managed to be unsettling and anxiety inducing through some small occurrences/more so than big, dramatic ones. Even after students had been murdered, it was some of those small things that set you on edge. It was hard to know who was truly safe . . . or for how long.

The answers we get by the end of the novel are almost more dramatic for their lack of being something big, showy or over the top. It is something that seems so absurd, yet also makes a lot of sense.

I really appreciated the way that why Makani was sent to live in Nebraska, what had really happened, worked into the story. It was both completely separate from the killings and not at all, at least for her. Her struggling with that secret, the relationships she was trying to build, and the horror and fear around a killer all worked together better than I anticipated. This is a sweet, cute story that will also set your nerves on edge and have you watching the shadows.