Review: MARY: Unleashed by Hillary Monahan

MARY: Unleashed by Hillary Monahan
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion
Release Date: September 8, 2015
Book Format: Hardcover
# of Pages: 245
Synopsis: Mary in the mirror.
Mary in the glass.
Mary in the water.

Mary lurks in the emptiness, in the darkness . . . in the reflection. That is, until Jess unleashes her into the world. Now Mary Worth is out and her haunting is deadlier than ever.

No one is safe.

Shauna, Kitty, and Jess must band together to unearth the truth about Mary's death to put her soul to rest for good. Their search leads them back to where it all began-to Solomon's Folly, a place as dangerous as the ghost who died there a century and a half ago. Quick sand, hidden traps and a phantom fog are the least of their worries. To stop Mary, they need to follow a dark string of clues and piece together a gruesome mystery that spans generations.

But time is running out.

As chilling facts come to light, Mary inches ever closer to her prey. Can Jess, Shauna, and Kitty break Mary's curse before it's too late? Or will history repeat itself until there is no one left to call her name . . . ?


Meet Hillary, (Taken from Goodreads)

 
Hillary Monahan is Eva Darrows is also an international woman of mystery. Holed up in Massachusetts with three smelly basset hounds, she writes funny, creepy things for fun and profit. 

(I absolutely love this intro that is why I used it!)

My Review:

I borrowed Mary: Unleashed by Hillary Monahan from work and this is my honest review.

This book is the much-anticipated sequel to Monahan’s first book, Mary which is about a group of girls who decide to summon the legend of “Bloody Mary.” One girl in particular, Jess decides to summon Mary because she happens to be an ancestor of hers, and Jess wants to learn more about her. The problem is, her and her three friends get a lot more than they bargained for when Mary latches on and terrorizes them throughout the whole book, she even kills a few people along the way.

The second book follows the two surviving friends, I will not release names so as not to spoil the first book. But this sequel is these two girls adventure in trying to solve Mary’s death in order for her to stop terrorizing the human world forever. The process of these two girls finding, and collecting clues as to how Mary died, and ways to possibly get rid of her was intriguing. Between many chapters there were old letters for us readers to read, so we felt almost as if we were apart of the hunt too.

Even before hearing about these books I was extremely interested in the legend of Bloody Mary. This story brought back memories, to back when I was in camp as a little girl. My friends and I used to lock ourselves in the camp bathroom, turn the lights off and play around with calling out bloody mary. Nothing ever happened, but I remember being so scared every time I walked into the bathroom, for fear that she was going to pop up. Thank god that phase didn't last long.

I cannot say much else about this book without giving away spoilers, but I must say it was very well written, and extremely intense. I was biting my nails, and hanging onto the end of every page the whole time I was reading. I also loved the fact that I got the chills every time Mary was described in the book, or when the girls knew she was around by hearing her moans or smelling her, that brought me back to being scared at camp too and I loved every second of it!