Hold Back The Tide

by Melinda Salisbury

Genres: Fantasy, Horror, Young Adult
Pages: 297
Rating:

Synopsis:

Everyone knows what happened to Alva's mother, all those years ago. But when dark forces begin to stir in Ormscaula, Alva has to face a very different future - and question everything she thought she knew about her past...

Melinda Salisbury’s Hold Back the Tide has a heck of a first line, and a rattling pace from there on. It took me only just over an hour to read, despite being 300 pages long, which I hadn’t really expected. I’d forgotten most of the reasons I grabbed a copy, just that I’d enjoyed The Sin Eater’s Daughter, so it’d been kind of languishing on the TBR, but it surprised me.

It does feel a bit YA-ish, and there’s a touch of a love triangle — sort of, maybe. There’s sort of an impending potential threat of one, anyway, or you can read it as such. But this is definitely a thriller too, with more of a horror vibe than I was expecting: not only is the main character living with the constant fear of being killed by her father (which we learn immediately), but there are monsters coming out of the loch, people going missing from the village, and the obsessive sliminess of a man who loved her mother and now wants to have control over her. The tension and atmosphere is done really well.

I was enjoying the book well enough, but wasn’t sure whether it was really going to stand out, especially when one of the character survived what looked like a certain death; it just felt like things were going to resolve all too easily, leaving the book kind of toothless. I won’t spoiler, but the ending — while classic in its way — definitely fixed my impression that it was going to shy away from a bad ending.

Overall, I’m glad I finally got round to this; I had a lot of fun.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)