Tour Review: The Hallowed Ones by Laura Bickle

The Hallowed Ones by Laura Bickle

• Pub. Date: September 25, 2012
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin court
• Pages:311
• Series: The Hallowed Ones #1
• Goodreads/Amazon/Book Depository

Katie is on the verge of her Rumspringa, the time in Amish life when teenagers can get a taste of the real world. But the real world comes to her in this dystopian tale with a philosophical bent. Rumors of massive unrest on the “Outside” abound. Something murderous is out there. Amish elders make a rule: No one goes outside, and no outsiders come in. But when Katie finds a gravely injured young man, she can’t leave him to die. She smuggles him into her family’s barn—at what cost to her community? The suspense of this vividly told, truly horrific thriller will keep the pages turning.

First Line: After the end of the outside world, the Plain folk survived.

Review: I don't do too many tours where I actually review the book ( since I have way too many books to review as it is ) but I had to sign up for this one because of my curiosity about the Amish community and then to see that the author added Vampires to the mix...oh yea I signed up without even thinking twice about it.

Katie is anxiously awaiting for Rumspringa, but before she even has the chance to experience the modern world an epidemic occurs which pretty much wipes out a lot of the worlds population. The only places that are safe are churches and other holy grounds which include the Amish land. Of course the people in the Amish community are ignorant to the fact of what is going on in the outside world since they have no form of technology to find out, they just know there is a crisis and have made a rule that no one is allowed to leave or come inside their gates. 

Katie was a surprise for some reason going in I thought she would be submissive and just a goody two shoes but she was far from that. She was rebellious, independent and strong which really made me admire her character. I really grew a liking for her when she rescued Alex from outside the gates even though the Elders of her community had left him out to die. As far as the Elders, they pissed me off I'm not sure if that was what Bickle was going for but if so then she nailed it, because the Elders were so set in their ways not listening to Katie about what was out there and putting their own people in harms way.

I read this book late at night so plain and simple there were parts of this book that really had me freaked out. Bickle does not hesitate to give us detailed descriptions of all the gore and not to mention the vampires were truly terrifying these were like the old school vampires not the ones we swoon over in most books nowadays.

As wonderful of a read this was I did have a couple of issues with the book such as it did take me a while to really get invested into the novel since the pacing in the beginning was pretty slow. Also the characters besides Katie could have been more fleshed out, there were a lot of interesting characters surrounding her but I didn't get to know them as well as I would have liked to. 

Anyways even with the few issues I had I enjoyed reading The Hallowed Ones and I am so glad to see that there is a sequel because the way it ended has just upped my curiosity about a few things that will hopefully be revealed in the next book.