A Throne of Books

3/5 stars

*Disclaimer: I received a copy from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.*

Set in Alabama during the 1930s, Hoodoo tells the story of twelve-year-old Hoodoo Hatcher, who is born into a family with a rich tradition of practicing folk magic, or Hoodoo, as most people call it. But even though his name is Hoodoo, he can’t seem to cast a simple spell. When a mysterious man called the Stranger shows up in town Hoodoo starts having dreams of a dead man rising from the grave. Even worse, he soon learns the Stranger is looking for a boy. Not just any boy. A boy named Hoodoo.

This book is not an easy one for me to rate, it never seemed to fall in just the middle for me. The first part of the book irritated me to no end and I didn’t really want to continue the story. At some point the story switched to readable and became genuinely enjoyable as I had hoped it’d be. At the most basic it’s an interesting story about a little black boy who lives with his grandmother in a time when they still had to have a separate day for colored people at the fair. In the end I decided to go with just a middle rating of 3 stars. It reminded me quite a bit of the Series of Unfortunate Events Series which to a number of people would be a great thing. To me it reminded me of a story I found a great idea but overall repetitive and aggravating. The biggest problem I had with the Lemony Snicket series was the definitions followed by the same phrases every time. Hoodoo had a habit of defining something followed by if you didn’t know, if you didn’t know. It totaled about 30 times throughout the story. I don’t know why it bugs me so much but it’s not a kind of storytelling I enjoy.

Once the story gets rolling it becomes much more enjoyable and a fun story for kids who like scary stories. It really is an interesting and slightly creepy at times. All in all if you didn’t mind the repetitiveness of Lemony Snicket’s book then this is probably one you would enjoy.