Poison Ink by Christopher Golden
From the back cover:
"Sammi, TQ, Caryn, Letty, and Katsuko are floaters. None of them fits in with any particular group at Covington High School—except each other. One night, to cement their bond, the girls decide to get matching, unique tattoos. But when Sammi backs out at the last minute, everything changes. Faster than you can say "airbrush," Sammi is an outcast, and soon, her friends are behaving like total strangers. When they attack Sammi for trying to break up a brawl, Sammi spies something horrible on her friends' backs: the original tattoo has grown tendrils, snaking and curling over the girls' entire bodies. What has that creepy tattoo artist done to her friends? And what—if anything—can Sammi do to get them back?"
I was told that I absolutely must read this book by Little Willow once she knew that I had gotten this book from Random House. When I first started out, I was beginning to wonder just what exactly LW saw in Golden's prose. The book in the beginning was not terribly compelling, but about halfway through the book is where it got to be a page-turner, and that ending more than made up for the almost lackluster start. I was seriously on the edge of my seat during the entire second half and couldn't stop reading until I got to the end. The variety of characters in this book is also worth mentioning; Golden takes these five friends and makes them completely different and easily distinguishable from each other, hopefully giving each reader at least one of them to relate to. But these aren't the only ones- many of the other characters are also fully fleshed out. A really good read, and not too expensive as it's a paperback original.
Sometime this weekend, Little Willow and I will be doing another He Said, She Said blog for Poison Ink. This will be Part 1 of our Christopher Golden He Said, She Said posts. Part 2 will be later this month and focus on Golden's upcoming book Soulless, which will be out on Oct. 21. If you want to read Little Willow's review of Poison Ink, click here.
6 comments :
Thank you so much for posting about Poison Ink here! I'm glad to hear someone else sing its praises, and I'm glad that you took me up on my recommendation.
Anytime, LW! If you have any other recommendations, let me know. I'm always open to other recs.
"Lackluster prose"? Wow. I should think so.
"None of them fits in with any particular group at Covington High School—except each other." That sentence is the sort that makes English teachers want to scream.
And "..the girls decide to get matching, unique tattoos." Um, how can they be "unique" if they all match?
Now, the assertion that it's a page-turner is still enticing; I just might pick it up anyway. But that blurb from the back of the book is horrid.
How does it compare to Ink Exchange by Melissa Marr? That's also about evil tattoos taking over a girl. It was well-written but too dark for my personal tastes.
a paperback writer: Poison Ink by Christopher Golden is a really cool thriller. I hope that you will pick it up! Can't blame the author for the back cover summary. :)
I liked Poison Ink more than Ink Exchange. I felt as though the characters in Poison Ink were better developed and that the storyline was far more complete.
I agree with what LW said. When I talk about lackluster prose in the book, I'm talking about the actual writing, NOT the back cover summary. The author does not write that, and it's only a summary. Nothing big and certainly not something to judge the author's writing on since he didn't write it, as LW said.
As for PI vs IE, PI is also pretty dark and thriller-ish. I enjoyed IE too, and probably actually more than I enjoyed PI, but the two aren't really comparable, I think. PI has no faeries, lol.
And it's "unique" because they're the only ones who would be getting it. It's a specific design that the tattooist they went to drew up, and would only put on them and no one else.
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