maybe it’s the pacing and how the book’s structured but it didn’t work for me at all. the book builds up to this big ending and then it’s not what you’d expect. another complain i have is the reveal – i found it lacking and not suspenseful at all. there’s a lot of back-and-forth between brom and ben about the woods and how ben should stay away from the forest – he doesn’t and then we’re back to watching these two argue again. I feel like the book has a tendency to get repetitive after a while. another thing horseman does well is ben’s character arc – we watch ben’s process of self-discovery.

the portrayal of grief in this novel was spot-on and i quite appreciated the commentary on losing loved ones. I adored how the book handled family and the unconditional love between people that share the same blood. however, the ending chapter made me completely lose my interest as it felt a bit unnecessary and dragged-out. i was so intrigued by the first part of this novel. the build-up was done so, so well – the sudden appearance of headless corpses of both animals and children. i loved how subtly magic was woven into this town, how people accepted its existence and yet they denied the horseman’s existence. The atmosphere of the novel has the same eerie vibe that the sleepy hollow movie has – the author did an amazingly well job at crafting the small town feeling. i really like christina henry’s take on this urban legend – it’s was an interesting follow-up to the myth, set after crane’s encounter with the horseman. “horseman: a tale of sleepy hollow” was a fun addition to the original tale of the headless horseman.

Horseman by Christina Henry