(This review can be found on my blog The (Mis)Adventures of a Twenty-Something Year Old Girl in October).


As a fan of horror, I thought I'd end up loving this book. However, that wasn't the case. It was an okay read, and I use that term loosely.

Lisa Morton is a horror author who knows a vast amount about Halloween, as in she knows where the tradition started and all the variations. When she gets an email from a university professor saying they found a 1,500 year old Celtic manuscript, she's a bit skeptical. However, she decides to visit the professor and see what he has to say. After translating the manuscript, the professor is found dead. Could this be the work of the manuscript that spoke of the Sidh? It's up to Lisa and Conor ó Cuinn, an Irish archaeologist who found the manuscript, to save the world. But will they be in time?

I'm not a fan of the cover at all. I'm not sure if that's supposed to be a Sidh or not. I have no idea. All I know is that the cover never really pulled me in.

As for the title, it makes me think more of a love story than a horror story. Saying that, one of the translations of Samhain is summer's end according to the book, so the title does fit in with the book.

I thought the world building was alright. I really didn't find any flaws with it. The setting is a university office and an apartment, so nothing too exciting. I though the author did a fantastic job of making the Sidh feel real and like this could actually happen. However, the ending lets the world building down. (This next sentence may be slightly spoilerish). We're led to believe that the world will be destroyed if Bal-sab (the god of death) isn't destroyed. Well, I don't want to give it away too much, but yeah, it's very anti-climatic.

The pacing is extremely slow at the beginning. I was considering adding this title to my DNF (did not finish) pile. For whatever reason, I decided to carry on. Luckily, the story did improve and picked up quickly which meant I was able to finish this book.

The plot was interesting enough. It's told from the author's point of view (although this book is a work of fiction), and she even throws in titles of her other books along the way. I did like the whole Celtic/Pagan mythology throughout the book. I also really enjoyed the little footnotes throughout the book. Anyway, the protagonist of the story needs to translate a Celtic manuscript and save the world. While, it was an interesting premise, I felt that it was poorly executed due to too much info dumping, and what I felt was too much self-promotion for the author's other works.

I felt that the characters were just too run of the mill. They weren't written poorly, but they weren't written well either. I felt that maybe some back story for the characters, especially the main character, would've helped me relate to each character, but I just found myself not really caring what happened to them. I just couldn't relate at all, and believe me, I did try, but all the characters felt too monotonous for my liking. I would've liked it if at least one character had some sort of personality instead of feeling like a cardboard cutout.

The dialogue never seemed forced, but it did feel a bit stale. As I've said before, there was way too much info dumping for my liking especially towards the beginning of the book. The info dumping isn't quite so bad once the story progresses though. As for swear words, there are a few, but it's not too bad.

Overall, Summer's End by Lisa Morton is an okay (again, I use this word loosely) story. It was a fantastic idea but poorly executed, I think.

I'm on the fence with whether or not I'd recommend this book. I'd just say to read it yourself and come to a decision especially if you're into Celtic/Pagan mythology. I'd say the age group it would best fit would be those aged 16 .

I'd give Summer's End by Lisa Morton a 2.5 out of 5.

(I received a free ARC print copy through LibraryThing's Early Reviewers for a fair and honest review). ( )

I received this Librarything Early Reviewer book in exchange for an honest review.

Summer's End is a quick, spooky read that will put you in the mood for Hallowe'en. Lisa Morton plays herself, I guess, a self-proclaimed expert on Hallowe'en who's drawn into investigating a mysterious ancient document purportedly written by the last Druid. Morton, a skeptic, is made to question her assumptions about Celtic lore and magic.

I really like Morton's writing style. It sucked me in easily and, in many places, creeped me the hell out (pumpkins, no!). I also liked the info-dumps of Celtic mythology. My two main complaints are that (1) she, as the narrator, came a little to easily to the consideration of murder later in the tale, and (2) the ending was weak. I wanted more of a punch and all I got was a shrug. 3/5 ( )

Spoiler alert - if you've not read this book and you want to, there are some spoilers in the following review.

I got this book for free as part of Library Thing’s Early Reviewers programme. The synopsis sounded rather appealing: When Lisa Morton, author of The Halloween Encyclopedia, is called in to consult on the recent discovery of a fifteen-hundred-year-old Celtic manuscript, she’s at first excited about the light this monumental find might shed on Samhain, the mysterious Celtic precursor to Halloween. I was glad that I’d been lucky enough to get a copy, even though it took me a while to actually get around to reading it.

It’s a very short book, just 98 pages and is described as a ‘Hallowe’en novella’. Its short length and the fact that it was free are definitely its redeeming features, the actual story itself is terrible.

When I read the synopsis, I must have missed the fact that the main character and author share the same name. It’s actually more than that; the author is the main character and is writing it as a record of what happens. I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of that - it might have been a device to make the fiction seem more factual and ‘real’ but all it really did was make the author seem incredibly big-headed to think people would want to read a book about her and incredibly lazy for not being able to come up with a fictional main character. It comes across as rather self-aggrandising, especially when she goes on to list all her previous works.

If the idea of the book was as a ‘factual’ record of an event then that might explain the huge info dump of history in the first chapter which was incredibly off-putting. Not to mention that some of it was not entirely accurate. If this was to be a fictional book, that would be less of a problem, but if you’re presenting your story as factual, then you can’t get away with that quite so easily. And the sheer amount of footnotes (21 in 98 pages) was ridiculous.

The plotline itself was not particularly gripping or well-written. Half of it dragged while the other half wasn’t fleshed out enough. The characters were dull and I had no interest in any of them. I think most annoyances came from the amount of inconsistencies where a statement made on one page was completely contradicted a few pages later. She is petrified by some rustling leaves although a few paragraphs later she claims, “I’m not someone who frightens easily”. “I have no phobias, and being a lifelong city dweller” she says, but a short time later when she has a late night book signing, she’s again petrified by being out late at night on a city street. At one point, she says, “I have a soft spot for cheap, completely useless Halloween kitsch that makes me laugh. [..] miniature Halloween skateboards and goblin finger puppets” but when she sees a shop window containing “little papier mâché pumpkins (some were sprayed with glitter or even wore little aprons, which offended my highly-honed sense of Halloween decorum”. So which is it? Do you like the Hallowe’en kitch or not? And it says something when you’re writing about yourself but still can’t keep your characterisation straight.

She constantly claims that she is a sceptic but shows no evidence of this whatsoever. She immediately believes that the creature killed Armitage and accepts the Morrigan’s arrival with only the briefest of concerns: ‘Was I drugged? Nope. Okay then, it was real.’ When it’s pointed out to her that she’s a druid, she accepts this straight away. Harry Potter had more doubts about being a wizard than she did.

After all of this, the story ends with a complete cop-out. The only way to save the world is to sacrifice the young boy but she flat out refuses to even contemplate it. She would much rather doom the entire planet, but seems to think that somehow saving the boy’s life makes her a good person. How exactly has she saved him if she’s doomed the planet? Although she finishes by saying that all of this happened two weeks ago and nothing's changed yet so maybe she didn’t doom us all after all. That just kind of sums the whole book up. It’s totally all over the place, lacking cohesion and drama, but at the end, you just don’t really care enough about any of it. ( )

I won a copy of this novella from the librarything.com Early Reviews project.

I didn't like it. Considering the subject, I really wanted to find it fascinating. It was about Druids, Samhain and Celtic history with something that brought it into the modern world including magic and the Celtic magic alone should have been enough to keep me interested. It wasn't.

It was rambling, and boring and felt like I was reading someone's homework with a bit of a story thrown in with some attempts at gruesome, scary stuff.

Thank you Librarything.com for the win, but this book wasn't one for me. ( )

I received this ARC and it is not my usual kind of book. All in all, I liked the book. It was powerfully written, but I felt it was little too short. ( )