#REVIEW: The Girl from the Well, by Rin Chupeco

(Rin Chupeco, autocorrect! Rin! Sorry about the typo in the headline.)

Let’s start with this: I apparently have no idea what makes a book YA, and I’m starting to think it really is code for “a fantasy book written by a woman” or, worse, “a book starring a young person,” without regard for content. Sarah Maas is the best example of this, as the later books in the Throne of Glass series include fairly copious amounts of highly detailed sex, and Rin Chupeco’s The Girl from the Well is not only scary as hell but drops a “motherfucker” pretty early on in the text, and while it’s not super sweary in general it’s also not especially shy.

Not, mind you, that any of this is a bad thing, just that if you’re an adult and you generally avoid books with “YA” or “Teen” in their descriptors you probably ought to stop doing that, because it really does seem to be pretty meaningless as a category most of the time. This particular book doesn’t even involve a love triangle, which does seem to be a bit of a trope. No romance at all, actually.

No, what The Girl from the Well gives you is that rarest of things, to the point where I can only come up with a few examples: a genuinely scary book. I’ve read one other book by this author before and I didn’t especially take to it, but The Girl from the Well is squarely in my damn wheelhouse: a supernatural tale of possession, and evil spirits, and revenge, and murder, and to make things even more interesting it’s narrated by one of the ghosts, which was just a phenomenal way to approach the story, especially since the ghost isn’t quite sane. Chupeco uses this trick where she occasionally

uses

her line breaks

for emphasis,

and it wouldn’t work very well with a traditional narrator, but for an angry ghost it’s startlingly effective. You may be getting strong The Ring vibes from the cover, and there’s a good reason for that, as both The Girl in the Well and The Ring are based on the same Japanese myth, so there’s a very similar vibe, and if The Ring creeped you out this book is absolutely going to as well.

I pulled a move for this book that is really only possible when ordering books online, as I actually screwed up and bought the sequel, which is called The Suffering, first, because I didn’t realize it was a sequel. So I had to order this and just sort of hope that I’d want to end up reading both of them, which ended up working out great, since I don’t have to wait for it to get here now. I’m going straight into it, so we might have another review for that book in a day or two.

This is a great read, especially with Halloween coming up. Give it a look, and don’t let the YA tag mess with you. I promise I’m grown, and I loved it.