Ann Marie Meyers: Book Review: Eleanor The Unseen by Johnny Worthen

It was a gamble for Eleanor to rejoin humanity, but she was driven to it. She’d been too successful forgetting. The last vestiges of her family hung by a thread in her transformed brain and drove her to be reckless. Ten years later, Eleanor hides in plain sight. She is an average girl getting average grades in a small Wyoming town: poor but happy, lonely but loved. Her mother, Tabitha, is there for her and that’s all she’s ever needed. But now her mother is sick and David has returned. The only friend she’d ever had, the only other person who knows her secret, is back. And Eleanor again becomes reckless.

Eleanor is a modest girl, unremarkable but extraordinary, young but old, malleable but fixed. She is scared and confused. She is a liar and a thief. Eleanor is not what she appears to be.

Here is my take on this book:

Johnny Worthen reels the reader in like a fish on a hook, with anticipation and patience, until he has you exactly where he wants you. With slow, deliberate strokes he introduces Eleanor, a girl on the outside, monster on the inside, yet more human than most.

Eleanor The Unseen is not a YA horror in the typical sense of the word. The novel is more a psychological thriller that takes you into the mind of a young teenager, showing the monstrous things she is capable of but pairing them with the human aspect of her psyche.

Worthen reveals Eleanor’s secret at just the right time, in just the right amounts, never too much, never too little, never quite satisfying, always teasing, encouraging the reader to turn page after page after page.

In the end there is a twist, of course. Who is actually the monster? Who the true-to-heart person with humane qualities? This I will leave for you to find out.