Good Morning!

It’s officially my moving day! I’m in really good shape for my move that happens in a few hours so I’m stopping by to share my review of Shutter by Courtney Alameda.

This post will be short and sweet. I’m buddy reading this book with Iseult Murphy and this review is my individual opinion, but we will be posting our buddy read experience within the next few days.

Alright, let’s get into it!

Blurb:

Micheline Helsing is a tetrachromat—a girl who sees the auras of the undead in a prismatic spectrum. As one of the last descendants of the Van Helsing lineage, she has trained since childhood to destroy monsters both corporeal and spiritual: the corporeal undead go down by the bullet, the spiritual undead by the lens. With an analog SLR camera as her best weapon, Micheline exorcises ghosts by capturing their spiritual energy on film. She’s aided by her crew: Oliver, a techno-whiz and the boy who developed her camera’s technology; Jude, who can predict death; and Ryder, the boy Micheline has known and loved forever.

When a routine ghost hunt goes awry, Micheline and the boys are infected with a curse known as a soulchain.

As the ghostly chains spread through their bodies, Micheline learns that if she doesn’t exorcise her entity in seven days or less, she and her friends will die. Now pursued as a renegade agent by her monster-hunting father, Leonard Helsing, she must track and destroy an entity more powerful than anything she’s faced before . . . or die trying.

Lock, stock, and lens, she’s in for one hell of a week.

GoodReads 

The Review:

I gave this novel five stars, and it deserve a helluva lot more than that if you ask me.

This book was utterly fantastic, and easily made my list of favorites.

In this novel we follow Micheline, a young reaper who hunts the undead as well as spirits in the Helsing corps. Micheline can see the auras of anything undead, giving her a special advantage in hunting them.

However, when she and her small crew of reapers go in to a hospital to stop a rogue spirit, everything is not as it seems. Suddenly, Micheline and her crew find their world spinning out of control in a mad dash against time. Can Micheline figure out who this spirit is and how to stop them, or will she and her crew die trying?

Man, was I blown away by this book! Everything was just executed so flawlessly that I ate it up. Couldn’t get enough.

Let’s start with the characters. Micheline is strong-willed, sometimes snarky, and a badass of a reaper. She is a little rough on the exterior and how she presents herself to others, but deep down she really does care about reaping and all that comes with it given everything she’s lost. Ryder, Jude, and Oliver (her crew) all had great personalities that also jumped through the page, and I could easily see their interactions, personalities, and body language in my mind as I read along.

The plot and concept was fire to me, an instant win. We’ve got this dark world, torn by spirits and necros (physical undead) that I simply adored (I’m a very doom and gloom kinda guy). The main plot I really didn’t see coming, and there were constant plot twists that kept me blazing through those pages. There was plenty of great action and tons of horror, but some tender moments too that made this a very well-rounded experience.

Flow was immaculate. Nothing veered off course, and every thought that Micheline had made sense and was understandable given her past.

All in all, this book was a tour de force, a real showstopper, and I am extremely happy to put this book on my shelf at home as one of my favorites of all time.

Can’t recommend this more!

That’s a Wrap!

Thanks for stopping by, and happy reading!

Have you read this book before? What did you think? Do you have a book recommendation similar to this one? Feel free to share in the comments!

If you’d like to see other reviews of mine, feel free to check out my blog homepage or my GoodReads. You can also follow my GoodReads reviews here. There are some great binge-worthy books on there!

Have a great day!

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