Pinoy Book Tours: The Girl from the Well (Review)

This is my first time to join Pinoy Book Tours, a book tour site that promotes YA authors and their books to the Filipino audience. I'm very excited to take part in reviewing Rin Chupeco's The Girl from the Well. I've known Rin personally during my cosplay years (le gasp), and I was psyched to know last year that she had an upcoming book.

Without further ado, I invite you to check out my review as the tour takes a stop on my blog today.

About the book

Goodreads | Amazon

You may think me biased, being murdered myself. But my state of being has nothing to do with the curiosity toward my own species, if we can be called such. We do not go gentle, as your poet encourages, into that good night.

A dead girl walks the streets.

She hunts murderers. Child killers, much like the man who threw her body down a well three hundred years ago.

And when a strange boy bearing stranger tattoos moves into the neighborhood so, she discovers, does something else. And soon both will be drawn into the world of eerie doll rituals and dark Shinto exorcisms that will take them from American suburbia to the remote valleys and shrines of Aomori, Japan.

Because the boy has a terrifying secret - one that would just kill to get out.

The Girl from the Well is A YA Horror novel pitched as "Dexter" meets "The Grudge", based on a well-loved Japanese ghost story.

My review

Rin Chupeco definitely knows how to start off a debut with a bang. Ever since I read The Girl from the Well's synopsis, I had been particularly intrigued. Reading the first few pages already reeled me in the story, determined (and curious) to know more about the main character. 

Needless to say, I didn't expect to grow a certain fondness for the ghost Okiku. Supernatural beings are usually typecast as evil creatures, but Okiku was neither the typical good or bad character. There was a reason for her being and a reason why she did things out of vengeance. Okiku was fleshed out as a character that she felt more real to me than the other characters, Tarquin and Callie. While Okiku resounded a lot more to me as a reader, Tarquin and Callie complemented well in bringing out Okiku's likeability despite her strangeness.

Chupeco's debut novel displays not just her impressive writing but her unnatural ability in executing a narrative in an omnipotent POV. It was the first time I encountered such a thing and I was surprised that I got on to it really well. Chupeco also presented a well-detailed understanding of Japanese and Western horror genres that worked well in the storytelling. 

The Girl from the Well is a breath of fresh air in the YA genre despite its horror and macabre elements. It is truly an engaging, fast-paced, and provoking read.