Hollow - my thoughts on a book

Expect book spoilers for 'Hollow' by Caroline Peckham and Susanne Valenti in this post.

This post is about Hollow by Caroline Peckham and Susanne Valenti, the first in the Crown of Hearts & Chaos series. Here is its Goodreads link and some info from there:

Hollow is a dark Romantasy from the bestselling authors of Zodiac Academy, Caroline Peckham and Susanne Valenti. It is a heady cocktail of Summoners, seduction and spirits, set to get your heart racing and feet kicking. There will be a ruinous, black hearted love interest, a rebellious, ruthless FMC, plot twists, cliff hangers, dark humour and a healthy seasoning of make-you-blush spice. It is not for the faint of heart. All those who enter the forest are bound by its terms – will you walk willingly into the dark?

Hollow by Caroline Peckham and Susanne Valenti

There is far more telling in this book than showing.

It made this book… hollow. 🥁

Here, the FMC, Ferris, is hiding in a stable and is climbing a ladder to reach the hayloft above:

“Without allowing a single doubt to cross my mind, I began to climb, my eyes on the square opening which led into the hayloft beyond. Six rungs, seven, eight, nine –

I barely stifled a scream as the tenth split beneath my weight and fell with a clatter to the flagstones below, leaving me dangling by my fingers above a drop which may not have killed me but would certainly hurt like a bitch.

My legs swung wildly as I fought to heave myself up and get a foot on the next rung.

Footsteps crunched across dead leaves far too close for my liking and I prayed to all the spirits in the forest for aid.

With a surge of strength, I managed to pull myself higher, my foot finding purchase at last and allowing me to reach for the edge of the hayloft’s entrance.”

I get 0 tension from this! There is no emotion or feeling here.

She’s dangling by her fingers and in peril but her struggle is written in the exact same manner as dropping a mention of hearing the footsteps. Holding your weight up with just your fingertips would also hurt but we never share any of her feelings like numb fingers or aching arms? Even nearly falling is only mentioned as a possibility, not an actual concern to be worried about.

Photo by Sebastian Unrau on Unsplash

When Ferris first lands in the cursed forest at the start of the book she joins up with other people but apart from random names being thrown around you wouldn’t even know she’s with different people—they all sound the same. The sentence rhythms all have the same flat voice. Whether Ferris is running from the forest itself, dangling from a falling ladder, fighting a spirit trying to kill her, having a conversation about a book, feeling upset about someone’s death (that she caused)—it‘s all the same sound.

The only time anyone in Ferris’s group acts like different people is when Ferris watches two of them having sex. That’s right: she heard weird noises and thought it was a boar, but it turns out it was the sounds of lovemaking. She watched them until another group member distracted her attention, but these people died not long after. This scene just seemed to be added to be titillating and ‘here’s some sex before the main characters get it on’ because it added 0 relevance to the story. It could be removed and nothing about the story changes because Ferris has no introspection about what is happening.

We never learn anything about her—not even her own thoughts about sex and relationships while she’s watching other people have sex. Her narration during this was simply describing the physical motions of these two people.

All of Ferris’s narration is very present and in the moment, just telling us what is currently happening with focus on the now and this make her dull. It’s very much like the “Failure to Stop for Gas” example in Rebecca Makkai’s series about interiority:

Interior(ity) Design Fails

There are no thoughts of the past, of memories, of experiences, of anything that relates her character to what she has done to what she is doing. The closest is the opening of the first chapter in which she is daydreaming. This reads very much as if this a distant memory—either her own or something from a past life she has forgotten, but it doesn’t anchor us into knowing that this daydream is about Ferris.

The lack of her introspection seems very withholding, like divulging her thoughts, memories, and motivations will ruin a future “surprise twist” reveal but in return we get a very bland, blank personality.

Is she funny or something?

Before starting this book I was not familiar with these authors or why there are two of them but once the MMC, Hendrix, was introduced in his own POV chapter I could tell a different person wrote it compared to the Ferris chapters—so the two authors very obviously wrote a different POV each. It’s inconsistent and jarring like two different books stuck together.

Part of what makes this so jarring to me is that Hendrix does have introspection. It makes it more obvious that it is missing from Ferris’s POV. The world building information Hendrix provides is also not an info dump or something we’d read on a fact sheet. He provides information with personality and emotion to understand this is information through his lens. Ferris might as well be reciting the information she shares out of a book because it doesn’t come across as being told from her just by her.

One positive thing I did notice is that the world building from either POV appeared at what seemed like relevant times and not just all front loaded before it was needed. For Ferris, it just needed to be personalised.

Sadly for Hendrix, his personality is not so much bad boy fae but if Rumpelstiltskin from Once Upon A Time and Krombopulos Michael in Rick and Morty had a lovechild. He’s a moustache twirling evil loving killer who loves death, trouble and seeing his enemies in pain and giggles over their suffering with glee.

Ferris tells us she is reckless and defiant (even the blub claims she’s rebellious), but through the book so far we had never been shown that. It could be argued running off into the cursed forest like she did was reckless but without any introspection about who she is and her past, we never got to know her outside of what she’s currently doing to determine that for ourselves. She also tells us that she had planned to go into the forest. An early conversation with someone reveals that she had been training. Planning and training do not indicate recklessness to me, even if what she wants to do isn’t a very smart.

So when she starts interacting with Hendrix—who has captured her—in such an argumentative way with insults, snide and snarky remarks, aggression (the book claims to be enemies to lovers) it felt like a completely different person because we had never seen Ferris act or think that way before. And this personality shift only happened in Hendrix’s chapters. Once it switched back to Ferris’s POV she did not act this way and once again became flat. But we know that her behaviour wasn’t just Hendrix’s perspective of Ferris, because Ferris admits to acting that way (telling us!). We never see this from her POV.

I ended up putting this book down about 25-30% of the way through. Out of the two authors, whomever wrote the Hendrix chapters I wish wrote the whole book. I probably could continue if the book was written the same way his chapters were.

Have you read Hollow? What did you think?

Let me know if you have a Romantasy recommendation!