jenjn79's Reviews > The Hollow

Second book in the Sign of Seven trilogy by Nora Roberts. While I still enjoyed this book, I didn't like it as much as the first book. I'd give it a 4, maybe 4.5, stars.

The Hollow continues the tale about six people: Cal, Fox, Gage, Quinn, Layla and Cybil, trying to find a way to beat a centuries old evil that terrorizes the town of Hawkins Hollow for seven days every seven years. The group now knows that this is the time, this is the Seven, that they can beat back the evil. But they must work together as a group, and they desperately need to find information about what they need to do. Fox and Layla have to learn to work together and learn how to use their tool of Seeing the present if they want to succeed. For Layla, it's not so simple because not that long ago, she was just a regular working girl. Now she's in a strange place where an ancient evil threatens them all, and where she's suddenly developed sixth sense abilities she never would have believed in before. Fox plans to help her through it, though. For him, it's been a part of his life since he was ten's years old and a simple blood brothers ceremony between him, Cal and Gage released the evil that plagues them.

This was a good book, but like I said, it wasn't as good, for me, as Blood Brothers. For two reasons really. The first being that the books were a bit too similar when it came to the plot and the progression of the plot. They were both basically the group researching and dealing with scattered events instigated by the bad guy. Sure, in the end, they had the task of trying to get the bloodstone back together. But throughout the book, there wasn't really anything to set it apart from the first book. There wasn't quite enough action to show the story progressing. In a way, it was kind of like reading the same story, with different lead characters (Fox and Layla in this one). But don't get me wrong, it wasn't so similar that I was bored or anything. I had no problems getting through the book. I just thought there could have been something a little more to set it apart.

And the second reason...hmm, well I guess it's just that Fox and Layla didn't interest me as much as Cal and Quinn did. Layla annoyed me every now and then. So that set this book a small step below the first one.

Aside from those two things, I'm still enjoying this series. True it has it's similarities to other NR books - battling back an ancient evil a la Three Sisters Island trilogy - but all the details make it its own series. I'm looking forward to reading the last book (and I'm really glad that I waited to read the first two books until the third came out and I could read them all together).