[an older review]

I bought this book last summer, and I read something like five pages of it. It was boring so I put it aside, forgetting about it until recently, when I finished it. And ohhhh boy, the world of boring stupid female protagonists and brooding hot guys is larger than I realised.

This is the summary on the back:

Dunvegan School for Girls has been closed for many years. Converted into a family home, the teachers and students are long gone. But they left something behind....

Sophie arrives at the old schoolhouse to spend the summer with her cousins. Brooding Cameron with his scarred hand, strange Lilias with her fear of bones and Piper, who seems just a bit too good to be true. And then there's her other cousin.

The girl with the room full of antique dolls. The girl that shouldn't be there. The girl that died.

Wow, spooky, isn't it? And under this there's a disclaimer: WARNING! NOT FOR YOUNGER READERS!

This is of course because it's so scary and horrifying.

So the book begins with a flashback to when the house was a school. It's 1910, and the little girls are playing with creepy dolls called Frozen Charlottes.

Then we cut to our main character, Sophie, the girl with about as much personality as Bella Swan. She's sitting in a café with her childhood best friend Jay, and is of course oblivious to the fact that he's completely in love with her.

Jay downloads this Oujia board app on his phone and they try to contact her dead cousin Rebecca, who Sophie tells him died suspiciously when she was seven. The board starts spelling out random words like frozen, gate, charlotte, whatever,  and everything goes fucking mental, the lights start flipping out and there's a weird shadow hanging around and a little girl holding her hand and all this creepy shit. Because of course random apps you download on your phone always work.

When everything goes back to normal Sophie goes home and has a weird dream about Jay being dead, which is the most ridiculous foreshadowing ever.

Next morning her mother tells her that, guess what, Jay died. He was cycling home from the cafè and he fell into the canal and he drowned.

Like most mothers in teen fiction, Sophie's is written terribly. Mothers in teen fiction are vague smily characters that keep calling their children "sweetheart" and "honey" in almost every sentence and don't really have much personality outside of that. They rarely work, just hang around the house and disappear when it's convenient.

Mothers have their own lives too, you know. Their whole lives don't revolve around their children. They have jobs, hobbies, hopes and dreams too. Also my mother never calls me sweetheart or honey. I mean she calls me darling sometimes (rarely) but I hate hate hate when these fictional mothers say it all the time.

Anyway, the parents are going on an anniversary trip, and like all good parents who know their daughter's best friend just died, they leave Sophie behind and send her to stay with her cousins and uncle.

So she goes to meet her uncle, whom she hasn't seen in years.

He brings her back to the creepy (yep that word will feature a lot) mansion that they all live in. It's on the island of Skye, which is off the coast of Scotland, and the author describes how wild the sea is and the jagged cliffs. He's an artist and his wife is in a mental hospital, but his character hardly matters because like every parent/guardian in teen fiction, he's never around.

The first of her cousins she meets is Piper, a girl who's so over the top, friendly and cheerful that she grates on your nerves. She's so giggly and happy that I ended up hating her.

The other girl is Lilias, a little girl whose personality is the Creepy Kid™, who carries around a doll and says weird stuff about how the frozen charlottes in Rebecca's old room don't like Sophie. Because of course Rebecca collected weird dolls. Don't all seven year olds love creepy antique dolls that they find in the basement of their house?

The last kid is the hot guy, Cameron, who's broody enough to rival Edward Cullen. He has a burned hand from a fire in a tree house when he was little, but he likes to play piano, and the author goes out of her way to keep referencing the fact that they're not actually full cousins because her mum and uncle James are actually stepsiblings rather than full ones. Wow, I wonder what's going to happen.

I bet you can't guess who the villain of the story is 🙃

The  most cliche shit starts happening, like flickering lights, Lilias drawing creepy pictures, cold hands grabbing at Sophie while she's asleep, giggling in the middle of the night, etc, etc.

Piper tells Sophie all this stuff about how Rebecca was sort of casually a psychopath and did all this stuff like throwing kittens into the fireplace, you know, normal childhood memories.

Cameron gets angry at everything. He's the stereotypical angry tough guy. Every time Piper references his burned hand he flips the fuck out and storms out of the room.

"I wasn't playing by myself."
"Who were you playing with then?"
"With Rebecca."

LILIAS STOP SAYING CREEPY THINGS IT'S SO OVERDONE YOU JUST SOUND STUPID.

Sophie just conveniently finds a torch in her bedside drawer and investigates a creepy sound.

She goes into Rebecca's old room, where the dolls are scratching the glass of their display case.

See this is the point where you would FUCKING LEAVE, but Sophie is stupid. Lilias appears out of nowhere like the creepy kid she is and tells her to hide everything sharp. She also tells her the dolls talk to her at night.

Tell me why this family haven't left this house by now?

I mean, Lilias says the dad doesn't believe her about the dolls talking, but his daughter LITERALLY DIED THERE.
Before that she almost died in a fire that scarred his son's hand.
Creepy shit happens all the fucking time. Why is he so stupid?
Oh yeah. He's a parent in teen fiction and also a character in horror.

So Sophie is so creeped out by Lilias that she accidentally hits her and bruises her face, and when Cameron sees the bruise the next morning, we get good ol' brotherly love.

Cameron's chair screeched across the floor as he leaped to his feet, dragged Piper from her chair and slammed her hard up against the wall.
"What did you do?" He asked in a voice that was horribly quiet.
"Nothing," she gasped. "I haven't done anything."
"It was me!" I said, already out of my chair.

She tries to pull him away from Piper, noting of course, all the muscles in his arms.
And then he demands to know why, Lilias spins shit about accidentally hitting her with the torch in the dark, and he storms off.

Piper makes lemonade for Sophie, and there's just randomly a frozen charlotte doll in the ice cube that bites her.

That night she hears footsteps and goes to investigate because she's still fucking dumb.

It's Piper and her boyfriend, sneaking out. Get this - Cameron fucking whipped her boyfriend. Literally whipped him. His back is all angry white scars.

But Cameron couldn't do that without a good reason! Cameron's a good guy!
But they don't give a fucking explanation. At all. Never in the whole rest of the book do they have an explanation for this other than "He distrusts Piper."

SO WHY DID HE FUCKING WHIP HER BOYFRIEND? HER BOYFRIEND? NOT EVEN HER?

The next day, Sophie and Cameron take Lilias to town to get sweets.

Cameron just casually tells Sophie that Piper is the psychopath, not Rebecca. He says Piper was the one who set the fire in the treehouse when they were kids and threw the kitten in the fireplace, and she regularly does stuff like put butterfly wings in Lilias' bed to freak her out. He doesn't believe the dolls talk to her because as Lilias says "they don't talk to boys, only girls," so he just thinks Piper's been driving her nuts.
Sophie believes him without question.

If Sophie was a better fucking character, I would like this book a lot more. All she is a robot who says automatic responses and occasionally thinks about what's going on. She believes almost anything she's told, however contradictory. Piper could tell her that James paints himself in virgin's blood every full moon and goes out and chants in a forest and she'd just say okay.
The only thing she doesn't believe is anything that's ever said against Cameron, because of course Cameron is a perfect god with sculpted muscles who can never do anything wrong! Even Lilias says he's the best big brother ever.

She has no comprehension of personal safety. Someone could tell her that there's a guy with a massive chainsaw and a suit made of bloody human skin downstairs and she'd go and investigate.
So Sophie hears the dolls calling her and as per usual she decides what the hell, and goes into Rebecca's room, where Piper pops up out of nowhere.

Then Sophie asks Cameron why he whipped her boyfriend with a riding crop.

Cameron fixed me with his cold blue stare and I had to force myself not to look away.
"Someone had to," he said quietly.

Um how about no? I'm calling bullshit on that explanation, Cameron. However much a dick that guy is you literally flogged him with a riding crop and scarred his fucking back.

Piper goes off on her boyfriend's motorbike and they wake up the next day to find that some mysterious person smashed up Cameron's precious antique piano in the night. God, I wonder who it was?

Cameron blames Piper's boyfriend because I don't know, normal logic, and Piper flips out and says it couldn't have been him. So then she tells Sophie she injured her hand on her boyfriend's motorbike, so could Sophie write a letter to her friend for her?
Because emails and texts are so "impersonal."
Sophie is a dumb shit and does it, and when Piper asks if she wants to come camping with her and her friends at the weekend on the beach, Sophie is a dumb shit yet again and says yes.

Sophie takes a bath and horror cliche number 5000, someone writes on the steam of the mirror, Charlotte is cold.

She freaks out so much she wants to go home but they convince her not to and then Cameron tells her a fascinating story about how Piper was the one who set fire to the treehouse.

Then Sophie goes to bed and there's creepy piano music downstairs. Sophie remembers that the piano is broken, but whoop, guess what. Like a dumb shit she goes downstairs anyway.

Anyway there's a piano down there, being played by a little girl who looks just like Rebecca. Sophie takes a photo on her camera but for some reason doesn't show anyone, because, say it with me guys,

SHE
IS
A
DUMB
SHIT

Sophie researches about a fatal fire at the school one hundred years before and discovers one girl didn't die, a blind little girl named Martha. Very conveniently, Martha's niece works in the cafe that replaced the gift shop her family used to own. She calls Sophie "my dear" in nearly every sentence and conveniently knows everything.
So Martha and the other girls turned on each other once the dolls were donated to the schoolhouse, ending in the other girls blinding her with sewing needles, one of the girls jumping out a window and dying, and pushing the teacher down the stairs and killing her.

I HATE WHEN THINGS ARE SO CONVENIENT IN BOOKS. Just getting off topic for a second, a while ago I read a new book by one of my favourite authors and was incredibly annoyed. Get this, the girl's boyfriend was murdered by the serial killer, but the serial killer was kind enough to tell him his motives and plans, giving the boyfriend time to write it down, and they found the sheet he wrote on covered in blood but still legible. -_-

Getting back to Frozen Charlotte, Piper acts weird and Lilias says more creepy stuff about Rebecca saying Jay says hi and he left something on Sophie's phone for her.

But no time for that because Sophie heads off with Piper and her friends, only to discover that Piper is actually - who knew? - a massive bitch.

The message Jay left was him saying he wasn't joking when he asked her out.

So they play truth or dare and Piper says she was the one who smashed up the piano. Then Brett gets pissed because he was brought in for questioning over it.
Anyway they go to bed and then Sophie sees Cameron outside by the fire because he's obviously a stalker. Great.

And then she hears the dolls whispering and Brett screams because someone stuck needles in his eyes. Piper says she saw Cameron on the beach so whoooooooooooooop. Then he tells Sophie he was on the beach because he heard Rebecca calling him.

They go back home and Lilias says Piper didn't do it, she did. I'm getting sick of these characters contradicting themselves so much.

And hey! Want to know why Piper wanted Sophie to write that letter for her?
There's a suicide letter in her desk in a perfect copy of Sophie's handwriting, complete with her signature at the bottom. And the bitch called her parents and filled up the answering machine by perfectly mimicking her voice and saying she felt depressed and suicidal. And she's the reason that her mother is in a mental hospital, because she used to mimic Rebecca's voice and call for her.

Like honestly Piper is my favourite character in this. She's the smartest, and the only one with actual passion for what she does.

So Sophie does a very smart thing and gathers up the dolls, putting them in her suitcase and telling Piper she's getting a head start on packing.

While they eat sandwiches Piper makes the cattiest evil remarks - I honesty love her.

And then Sophie is a dumb shit for the millionth time. She throws them into the sea. They're porcelain. She could literally throw all of them against a wall and the job would be done. She could even burn them. But no, Sophie the genius throws them into the fucking sea.

And then she sees Rebecca on the cliff. She froze to death so there's ice and stuff all over her, and Sophie touches her hand and has a flashback.

Piper kicked Rebecca in the face and knocked her off the fucking cliff. The evil bitch left her little sister there alone, and that's how she froze to death. Wow. Honestly, Piper's psychopathy is the most interesting part of the story.

Then Piper comes after Sophie with a knife, then runs back to the house when Sophie tells her she threw away the dolls.

Sophie and Cameron go back to the house and smell petrol, but poor Sophie is confused and doesn't know what it means because hey SHE IS A DUMB SHIT.

So the ghost of Rebecca like leads them out of the burning house. Idk what Rebecca is even supposed to be anymore. For a while she seemed like a malicious character and now she's being helpful.

They escape into the garden and all the dolls that are built into the plaster call Piper and she goes inside and dies, woooooo.

Six months later

Ugh why did we need this?

As I walked down the road, the first few flakes of snow began to fall, settling in his black hair. He broke into a huge smile that made my heart flip-flop inside my chest.

Sophie and Cameron are basically a thing now.

IT'S NOT INCEST! THEIR PARENTS WERE ONLY STEPSIBLINGS, IT'S NOT INCEST!

So they hold hands a bit and talk about how Cameron got into music college and Lilias is normal now and Piper's dead.

And then we get an epilogue. Will this book ever fucking end?

The suitcase ends up on a beach somewhere and another little kid finds them, because of course.

WHAT I LIKED

I quite enjoyed reading about Piper once she showed how sociopathic she was. Her sickly sweet side was annoying and boring, but once she turned, my god she became a good villain. The bits with Lilias were also a lot more bearable after it was revealed she has a fear of bones/etc, because of Piper telling her terrifying bedtime stories like the psycho she is.

WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE

1: Sophie doing stupid things and just generally being cardboard.
2: Unnecessary romance.
3: Countless cliches that made me roll my eyes.
4: Flat characters.
5: Lazy "let's kill the villain" ending.

THINGS I STILL DON'T UNDERSTAND

1: I don't know wtf happened to Jay. It seems like the author intended to link it to Rebecca but completely forgot about it. Even Sophie doesn't give a shit after a few chapters. Rebecca didn't kill him. So what did?
Was it just a crappy coincidence that made no sense and related to no plot points whatsoever?

2: Why the hell did Cameron attack Piper's boyfriend? For fuck's sake, it was so incredibly violent, and he doesn't even give a proper explanation for why he did it. Sure, he suspected his sister was evil, but that was her boyfriend.

3: I don't understand why the dolls were evil? Usually in a story like this, the spirits of dead children are possessing them or something, but I don't think it was ever explained. They're just creepy dolls that are evil for some reason.

4: WHY THE FUCK DID SHE PUT THEM IN A FUCKING SUITCASE AND THROW IT INTO THE SEA?
Even a child knows you don't do that, because exactly what happened will happen. They'll wash up on a beach somewhere and some other kid will take them out and bring them home. It's what always happens. You should have burned them, you fucking idiot.

HOW THE BOOK COULD HAVE BEEN BETTER

This isn't a bad idea. With a bit of tweaking it could be good.

1: Gotten rid of the cliches. There is no need for her friend being in love with her, broody guys, children being creepy or giggling at night time. There isn't even any real need for the dolls. Creepy antique dolls have been done to death. I think it could be good if the whole thing was just about Piper being a psychopath. It's truly chilling when one child murders another - you could expand on that! Think of the possibilities. Finding out the dolls were telling her to do those fucked up things was just incredibly underwhelming and disappointing.
The best horror is real life horror. It would be far more terrifying to think that this actually happens in real life.

2: Given everybody proper personalities. Cameron is just brooding and violent, and that's all he is. Lilias is just creepy.
Sophie is just boring. Uncle James is just absent all of the time. I understand that he's still grieving for his daughter, but Christ. The only one who seems to have depth is Piper.
It would be so good to have Cameron desperately trying to protect his little sister from their psychopathic sibling, to have him actually being human. He loves his sister but he knows she's a danger to the family - that's so good! It's such a wasted opportunity.

James' absence could have been explained far more. Instead of just making the readers assume he's painting or whatever the shit, you could show that he is actually grieving. Perhaps he spends so much time away from his kids because they remind him too much of Rebecca and his wife. Speaking of his wife - she serves literally no purpose. Does she get out of the mental hospital now? Do her kids ever visit her?
I don't know, it's never explained or mentioned, she just doesn't exist after a brief explanation from Cameron.

Sophie's grief is nonexistent. Yes, we have a few chapters of her sort of thinking about Jay and half heartedly wondering if what happened to him was connected with the Rebecca stuff, but after a while she just forgets. It's like she has the attention span of a goldfish.

On a whole, the book wasn't the worst thing I've ever read. Sure it was frustrating in places, especially when Sophie did extraordinarily stupid things. The story was weak and the characters were pretty terrible, but to the fair to the author, I really liked the setting and the overall idea. And of course I loved Piper the psychopath. I only wish she could have got the backstory she deserved.