ARC Book Review | Insanity by Susan Vaught

Format: e-ARC

Source: Netgalley

Publisher: Bloomsbury Children's Books
Publication Date: February 18, 2014

Goodreads

 Never, Kentucky is not your average scenic small town. It is a crossways, a place where the dead and the living can find no peace. Not that Forest, an 18-year-old foster kid who works the graveyard shift at Lincoln Hospital, knew this when she applied for the job. Lincoln is a huge state mental institution, a good place for Forest to make some money to pay for college. But along with hundreds of very unstable patients, it also has underground tunnels, bell towers that ring unexpectedly, and a closet that holds more than just donated clothing....When the dead husband of one of Forest's patients makes an appearance late one night, seemingly accompanied by an agent of the Devil, Forest loses all sense of reality and all sense of time. Terrified, she knows she has a part to play, and when she does so, she finds a heritage that she never expected.

With her deep knowledge of mental illness and mental institutions, Susan Vaught brings readers a fascinating and completely creepy new book intertwining the stories of three young people who find themselves haunted beyond imagining in the depths of Lincoln Hospital.

I'm a sucker for creepy books so when I saw this book on Netgalley with that ghostly cover, it immediately got my attention and when I saw that it was set in my state, I was sold.  Unfortunately, it fell short of my expectations.   

Right after Forest's 18 birthday, she took a job working the graveyard shift at the Lincoln Psychiatric hospital in Never, Kentucky so that she could save up for college.  But Forest wasn't expecting that her place of employment would be a crossroads between the dead and the living. 

I found out very quickly that this would be a very confusing book, or at least it was for me.  From the beginning I had a hard time keeping up with what was going on, I thought I might have missed something and I would go back and reread but I never found what I was looking for.  It seemed like one minute nothing was happening and then suddenly with no warning, dogs and geese and darkness, I just really didn't know what was going on by that point.  All I know is that I was very confused by then. 

I feel like this story had promise but between all the POVs and the confusion, it just wasn't for me, but that doesn't mean that someone else won't love it.