The other day I picked a handful of books at near random and the one I decided to read of the bunch was Shadow Walkers by Nina Romberg, which we'd gotten at the used book sale at some point. It sounded interesting. Run-away children camping out together at an abandoned mental health institute but they start turning on each other and the only one who can help them is the star of the book, a lone 11-year-old girl.
My non-spoiler review is that it was a fast and easy read, I read all 302 pages in 5 hours, which for me is really fast. It was written in easily understood language (almost as though an 11-year-old is the one who wrote it) and moved really fast. However that doesn't necessarily mean it was a good book. It was an interesting read, something you might wanna take with you on a long plane trip or pack to the park or beach on a lazy, bored summer day, or curl up with on a bored, lazy winter day. But it's nothing special. I would never have paid full price for it. (at the used book sale it's 1.50 per inch of stacked books, so I reckon the book cost about 35 cents? I'm bad at math and measurements) The story takes a turn you would have never thought about. You think insane asylum, you think like Silent Hill type stuff (I forget which game it is but one of them is in a hospital or something), but no. No. It was fun but not what I expected.
Now on to the review with spoilers.
So, you're thinking that the mental presence of sick people who were going through so much has filled the halls with images and memories that seep into the kid's minds and slowly destroy them, right? Wrong. It's a safe, regular looking building that you could mistake for a school or something, the only indication about what the building is is that it's got bars on the windows.
And then they, for whatever reason, decide to move aside a flag hanging on the wall while looking for pens and paper. Dunno, maybe it's just me but I don't think I'd look for pens hidden behind a flag. Anyway, the flag hid a door into a room with WWII stuff, both American and Nazi, and the boys go insane over it and start a militia type thing and treat the girls bad and the girls are totally not affected by the war-stuff. The room was a kind-of museum. Cause I guess it made sense at the time to keep a war museum on location of a WWII recovery hospital to remind those soldiers what they're trying to recover from.
Well it gets crazier. Apparently there's a convenient Indian medicine woman nearby who keeps plugging the author's first book (I guess this one is a sequel?) and determines that Hitler had infused the WWII Nazi stuff in that room with bad feelings that prey on the inner greed and evilness. ...apparently said greed and evilness is a testosterone only kinda thing as the girls are completely unaffected, except through how the boys treat them. The only "shadow walkers" reference was when the old woman made a comment in passing about how bad feelings run around without bodies and need to feed on bad parts of the mind to embody a person. Or something. And that they were using the WWII stuff to do it.
So through Indian magic they beat back the evil, and burn down the hospital without any concern or regard for the forest surrounding it that probably caught fire and burnt down a page or two after the book's end, and seeing as it's the middle of summer at the time that wild-fire probably got way out of hand and burnt half of Texas.
btw, anyone else think it's not feasible that an 11-year-old girl on her own walked from Louisiana to Texas? She'd have to have been really lucky.
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