Mary: The Summoning (Bloody Mary) by Hillary Monahan

Amazon/Barnes & Noble

Published by Disney-Hyperion

Review by Dani Hoots

Mary: The Summoning (Bloody Mary) by Hillary Monahan follows Shauna and her three friends who decide to try and summon Mary in the mirror. Little did Shauna know that her friend Jess actually knew the real myth behind Mary and what actually needs to be done in order for the summoning to work. Once they summon Mary, the circle is broken and Mary gets fascinated by Shauna and doesn’t leave her alone. Mary can appear in any reflective surface and haunts her, trying to hurt her every possible moment, and trying to destroy any person who gets in the way. With the girls be able to make Mary return to the grave? Or will Shauna be stuck running from Mary for the rest of her life?

This novel started out a little slow, and a bit confusing as it jumped back and forth a couple times, which was not needed. It seemed they only did that to capture the readers attention, and a sloppy job at that. But once you get past the first couple of chapters, it starts to get more and more scary and you begin to think you see something move in the mirrors. (Honestly couldn’t read this at night, though I get scared easily).

The characters were your stereotypical high school girls and I wished I knew a little more about them. I know that two of them had boyfriends, but you only saw one and knew nothing about hobbies, favorite subjects, etc. It was only focused on the horror aspect of Mary.

For being some girls who like spooky things, I want to know why they don’t put all their knowledge from the show Supernatural at work. Honestly, someone would have had to of known about the show and seen it. There was that and when they were trying to fight the spirit, they said they couldn’t find anything online. I would tend to disagree, if these spirits were real, then they would be real elsewhere and there would be some info online. The writer was just trying to corner them on information so she could search more on the history of Mary.

This book also leaves a lot of loose threads, as it leaves off on a cliffhanger for the next book (which I was upset about because it’s horror and I need to know that the ghost gets apprehended or something). So be prepared to have to read more than one book in the series. There is a lot of unanswered information, leaving you wanting to buy the next book.

I give this story a 4/5, as it was pretty creepy for a young adult novel, but the characters could have been more developed as high school girls and because there were a lot of questions left open.