The Missing by Jerico Lenk Published by Month9Books on October 10th 2017
Goodreads
It is 1890, and London has secrets. For sixteen-year-old Will Winchester, born Willow Winchester and raised as a young man, the safety of his own secrets rests one atop the other. Hiding his gender queerness is important. But so is hiding the ghostly voices of the Missing, which Will hears when no one else can … until the Spiritualist Black Cross Order of Occult Occurrences wants him in their service to keep peace between London’s living and dead.
The freedom to be himself may come with a price. Working alongside a patchwork team of misfits and unlikely allies, Will finds he isn't the only one keeping secrets. Someone does not want him to uncover the truth about the ghosts who aren’t just missing from the world of the living, but missing from history itself. Can he find the Missing before he ends up becoming one of them?
Before beginning my review I just quickly want to thank Chapter By Chapter Blog Tours for allowing me to be a part of this tour and to Month9Books for sending me a eArc of this debut novel to read and review for my participation in the blog tour. This is my honest and sincere review of The Missing.
If you are a reader of my blog you will notice that I don’t read or review historical fiction and that is honestly because I haven’t found that one book that would lure me in to this genre of books. This has been a genre of books that I never could get into no matter how many times I read I just couldn’t but I have to say after reading this I am thinking of trying something else within this genre, do you have a recommendation? If so please leave it in the comments and I will check it out.’
While I was reading The Missing I would have to say that I classify this as a bit of mystery, historical fiction, a little bit horror, (there was a few encounters with spirits that gave me the hibbie jeebes and I had to put the book down to get that image out of my head) paranormal and some fantasy. Clearly I am expanding my reading genre’s with this book.
Okay so the book takes place in London (one of my favorite cities that I am hoping one day to visit) during the 1890’s and its main character is Will/Willow Winchester, who is a teenager and he is hiding two big secrets from everyone. During this time period both are quite the big deal. The first one is that he can see the spirits of the dead and the second is gender. Meaning that he was born a female and has all the girl parts but when he presents himself to the world he acts and dresses like a male.
Something you might not know about me is that I believe that their is spirits are us on a day to day bases both good and bad. I have to say thankfully I have never encountered the bad ones just the good ones. For Will he has this special talent that allows him to see the spirits of the dead and in the book he stumbles upon some paranormal investigators. He gets recruited into the Black Cross and its this organization that studies and investigates the hauntings around London. For the first time ever Will feels like he finally has found a place were he belongs and he can be who he wants to be.
Over all I have to say I really enjoyed the book and I am happy that I got the chance to read and review it but I just have one little issue and that was a lot of characters in the book and as I would read a few pages I would have to go back and figure out who everyone was but I quickly solved that with keeping a piece of paper in the book with the list of characters and info about them so that I could refer back to that.
Even though there was a lot of characters the writing was fantastic and it kept me hooked and interested although there was a few people I would have loved to know more about and I hope that this continues into a series of books so that we can find more out more about them.
I look forward to reading more books by Jerico in the future.