Don’t Breathe A Word audiobook

I don’t always know what I want when searching for a creepy, scary book. Two things terrify me, faeries and psychotic minds. Naturally, I love Don’t Breathe a Word, because this book features both. Well, at least ONE of those things. Maybe the two aren’t mutually exclusive. Maybe they are so intertwined that it is nearly impossible to know which came first. In many a review, I have used the word “haunting”. I always meant it. At the time, whatever I was referring to (the entire book or a passage), indeed felt “haunting” to me. This book, however, epitomizes the true definition of the word. The story didn’t pull me in, rather it catapulted into me. I was captured. I became invested. The tale stayed in my mind, like a catchy tune…..admittedly a creepy, terrifying tune; but unshakeable nonetheless.Ms. McMahon has done amazing things here. I can give you a Book Review in the rawest sense, I don’t even have to delve into a summary or allude to the plot in order to entice you. For starters, if this book should ever be made into a film, I will not see it. The depth and richness of the characters is such that I feel as if I know Bee, Sam and Evie. I sympathize, support and struggle to understand them. I accept the flaws that Ms. McMahon has given them and embrace the goodness, even when buried deeply inside of someone. I won’t have my images spoiled.The intricacies of the characters’ pasts create and support the strong, unique personalities in this novel. Of course, spectacular characters can’t carry a book, and there is certainly no attempt to do so here. Instead, as Bee’s drama unfolds, the reader is kept guessing. There is more than one mystery to be solved here, but the book won’t be categorized that simply. Life lessons are learned, heart-wrenching decisions need to be made and loyalties are forcibly tested. Trust is established and broken. Inexplicable events in the past become decipherable, yet they become no easier to understand or accept. Supposed answers only lead to more questions, until there is really only one question remaining. What is real, and what is not.Rarely do I find a book that, to me, has everything. Don’t Breathe a Word does have everything I hope for in an amazing book, yet I’ve read nothing like it before.

Captivating. Slightly creepy. Very different from what I expected after reading the publisher description. Spooked me in a way I haven't been from reading a book. Its like when you're a child and you run up the stairs, not looking behind you, because you're unsure if the boogeyman is really back there or not.The ending was surprising. It was obvious that there two major ways the story could go. I was so drawn in to the story and characters and all the imaginative ideas and tales from the children of the story. This is definitely my favorite book of the last few years! (maybe my favorite of the decade)

Wow. What a ride. I'm left sad and astonished.

“But if people believe in them so strongly, doesn’t that give them power, more power maybe than even the truth?”This is my second book by this author, I thought I enjoyed the first one so much because it was an audio, but no, it seems I just like her writing style. One of the best things about this book is that it is very difficult to categorize - it could be fantasy or thriller, depending on how you interpret the story. It had me hooked throughout - because the author almost questions the validity of the fantasy element, it gets me to believe in it more. I was hooked from the first chapter, and really could not figure out what was happening and who was responsible until the end. I have just ordered all Jennifer McMahon's books, and will be reading them throughout the rest of 2017. I love the cover. If you enjoy fantasy and thrillers then this is definitely for you.The Story: Fifteen years ago, tween Lisa Nazzaro disappeared in the woods behind her home. Before she disappeared, she told her brother Sam and her cousin Evie that she was going to meet the King of the Fairies, who would take her to the Land of the Fairies and make her his Queen. Lisa was never found, and her disappearance is still shrouded in mystery.

If you have read this book all the way to the end, you know the truth. We are here, walking among you. We are stronger, faster, smarter. We walk with silent footsteps. We can see into your dreams.And we lie.Always remember that we lie. I have never been much interested in fairy stories (and judging by my GR buddies' books, there are A LOT of them out there). So some reason stories of the Seelie Court, or half-fairy chosen ones, or fairies secreting away the special main character for some greater destiny never did much to move my literary needle. As much as fairies have been a part of human lore, we often get this:Instead of this: I mean seriously, these are creatures that steal babies, replace them with sickly changelings, can appear and disappear at will, and possess magic beyond our ken. They should be terrifying in a Lovecraftian, elder Gods kind of way, with an alien, incomprehensible view of human and diabolical plans that we can never hope to understand, not pretty people who closely resemble humans in both outlook and appearance. We need more Gentleman with the Thistledown Hair and less Tinkerbells.This book gets it. It doesn't present fairies in some child's story book kind of way, but something much more malevolent. That it isn't like in all those cutesy little picture books - real fairies look like humans, only they're not. They're like our shadows... Dark magic. Here one minute, gone the next." This book revolves around a tragedy: a little girl who went missing fifteen years ago. The narrative picks up when her brother Sam, now in his twenties, and his girlfriend, Phoebe, receive a strange message suggesting that she might be alive and the discovery of a fairy book in his sister's hand writing. A very strange and terrifying encounter in a cabin the woods later they are confronted with the possibility that all is not how it seems. They are plunged into a deep hole where dark family secrets are unearthed and the line between the truth and fantasy becomes heavily blurred.This book had a lot of great things going for it. It very deftly walked the line between fantasy and human tragedy, constantly leaving me questioning if it was fairies or just depraved humans causing the trouble. Clues discovered pointed in both directions as the world of the fairy and our own seemed to blend together seamlessly. Was there a King of the Fairies who was orchestrating things form behind the scenes or was it humans who justified their actions by a delusional belief?The characters were also quite strong. The two main ones, Sam and Phoebe, felt very real. They had each survived their own childhood traumas and had found something more within each other, making a wonderful home together until their world was torn apart by the events of the book. McMahon did a wonderful job with their relationship and their histories that perfectly informed why they behaved the way they did. They were nuanced and sympathetic characters that I could really get emotionally invested in.The choice of how the story was told was also a great strength. Told alternatively between Phoebe's contemporary view point and Lisa's viewpoint from fifteen years before the story began did a wonderful job keeping tension high and foreshadowing events in both narratives. We can see, without being able to do anything about, the events that led up to Lisa's vanishing and how the events of that summer informed how the contemporary characters interacted with each other. The way she was seduced by the "Fairy King" was creepy as all hell and too realistic to be easily discounted.All in all this was a great read and kept me in suspense the entire time. There were so many twists and turns that I could never pin down what was going on. Was it Fairies? Was it a simple human tragedy? This book kept me turning the pages and eager to discover just what had happened to Lisa and what the fate of Sam and Phoebe was going to be. McMahon did an excellent job of showing and not telling, creating a very paranoid atmosphere with me guessing about the motives of everyone one I cam across.

An excellent read. Lots of twists and turns. I'd like to read more by this author.

This author is a master at blending mystery and horror. Her books always contain a supernatural element. In this story, it’s all about the fairies. Legend has it that the king of the fairies frequents the forest outside of Sam and Lisa’s childhood house. As children, Lisa and her cousin Evie have been playing in and exploring the haunted forest for as long as they can remember. At the age of 12, Lisa goes into the forest to meet the king of the fairies and disappears. Fast forward to 15 years later, Sam is dating Phoebe when he starts to receive strange messages that Lisa is coming home from the land of the fairies. Sam doesn’t believe that Lisa was taken by fairies, but long buried memories are now starting to surface. The plot alternates between Lisa’s POV when she was 12 and Phoebe’s POV 15 years later. The audiobook performance was just okay. The story itself was intriguing. Creepy, haunting and mysterious, i was keen to know what really happened to Lisa. The story ended with a bang. It was perfectly executed. I recommend to others looking for a supernatural mystery that is grounded in reality.

From the best-selling author of Promise Not to Tell and Harper Collins Publishers of New York city, comes a thrilling page-turner that pushes the limits of this world and that of fantasy, written by Jennifer McMahon.Starting with the first chapter, the protagonist, a young woman named Phoebe proves to be unlike other girls her age, showing characteristics fostered by her absent father and alcoholic mother. Promiscuous at a very young age, the teenage Phoebe seems to have grown up far too quickly.Fifteen years later, Phoebe has learned a few things over the years, most importantly to value herself.But some things don’t change, and though Phoebe now finds herself in a mutually beneficial and healthy relationship, she still carries with her many of the fears from her childhood.Though a woman in her thirties, Phoebe still fears the boogie man, a creature she believes crawls into her room through a trap door under her bed, and not just her bed, but any bed she ever sleeps in. Sam, Phoebe’s much more practical boyfriend is unaware of Phoebe’s dark, secret fears, but like Phoebe, he too has a hidden, well-repressed fear linked to the disappearance of his sister during their childhood.When Sam and Phoebe receive word that Lisa, Sam’s missing sister has returned to their hometown, a lot of questions begin to unravel, including whether or not it were possible that Lisa may have been kidnapped by a king of the fairies. Soon the two reunite with Sam’s cousin Evie, and the three begin to retrace the summer of Lisa’s disappearance.Though the premise may seem more akin to children’s fiction, I assure you this is not a book meant for young readers. One thing is certain, for those who love a good mystery and don’t mind slipping into the fantastical, this book is highly recommended. But a warning, this book is not perhaps recommended for before bed reading if you’re prone to nightmares.For more book reviews, please visit www.theornamentedline.wordpress.com.

My friends and I call this "The Creepy Girl Book", which I love. When you walk past this book while reading it, you instinctively want to turn the cover face down because it's so...well, creepy. Honestly, I was uncertain about how to rate this book. There were so many twists and turns that it was difficult to keep it all straight and I'm still not sure I know exactly what happened, but I think that's how the book is intended. I don't read fantasy and when I was reading this book, I was back and forth. Is this fantasy? No, it's not. Wait...is it? I think so. No, maybe not. I do have to say that this book was a page-turner and I felt compelled to finish and learn what really happened to Lisa!

** spoiler alert ** I read this as an antidote to Maggie Stiefvater's works, and boy howdy is it ever an opposite sort of work. Nothing twee here. Nothing simple. As with all the other authors whom I've never read before, I'm going to reserve judgement on whether I like McMahon's work as a whole, but Don't Breathe A Word certainly refreshed me after Shiver and Lament. Also, made me nervous in the night about shadows behind the closet door and noises under the bed...but no, I'll make you read the book too. No sense just one of us being scared.Fifteen years before 'present day', twelve year old Lisa disappeared into the woods around her home town of Harmony, telling her little brother Sam that she was going to the fairies who lived in a nearby ghost town, Reliance. Sam has lived with this secret ever since, and the promise he made to "Teilo", King of the Fairies, at the behest of his older sister. Phoebe has secrets of her own; childhood nightmares of a Dark Man who climbed from a trapdoor under her bed have persisted into adulthood, combined with her mother's death in a tub filled with iron kitchen implements under the running shower, clothes turned inside out1, have left her with mental scars equal to Sam's residue from childhood. In 'now', Phoebe is living with Sam, now grown, and loves him for his very stability and ordinaryness, though not wholly espoused to his treehugger vegan lifestyle. Their life together starts unraveling when Sam decides to spend a weekend with his cousin and her husband, having not spoken since Lisa's disappearance. The catch? It's not his cousin...she's unmarried and trapped in her apartment by agoraphobia...or is she? Their stable life together in the present unravels as more past issues bob to the surface. In the end, Phoebe is forced to hide with the paranoid friends (in Colorado) of her paranoid friend Franny (in Vermont) in an attempt to escape...whom? Well, to escape whomever held Lisa captive all those years. We're just not sure who, precisely, that was.If you're a fan of Maggie Stiefvater or Stephenie Meyers, avoid this book. If you're after a book that's unequivocally about the "faerie realm", avoid this book, particularly if you prefer the sweet ickle pixie type of Other Folk. This book is not for people who like simply structured books, as it alternates chapters between 'then' (events surrounding Lisa's disappearance) and 'now' (events surrounding her reappearance triggering a cascade of peculiar events) It's particularly not for people who like straightforward endings to straightforward plots; the ending to this one could be one of three things:     1) the Fair Folk are real, and they're as frighteningly powerful as the warning tales would have us believe     2) the whole story is something dreamed up as a protective shell for/by victims of some serious dysfunction that borders on Deliverance     3) the whole story, frame and all, is merely one told by an extremely unreliable narrator.To quote ZBS Media's "Ruby 2" radio play, "That wasn't a double cross! It was a triple cross!"1this may serve as a summary of the issues with the book's ending: the mother's death was possibly suicide, possibly a bad case of DTs brought on by a lifetime of deep alcoholism, possibly a vain attempt to protect herself from the Fair Folk

I don't know exactly, but the book warns not to cross them. The fairies can grant wishes, bring good luck, but if you get on their bad side...." Page 219Phoebe received a phone call asking to inform Sam to look in the attic in the crawl space. When Phoebe delivered the message, Sam knew what he would find.....the book his missing sister of 15 years had left there before she disappeared.More strange happenings occurred after the phone call and after finding the book. When Sam and friends went on a camping trip....someone resembling Lisa appeared at their door singing a familiar song; then that same person broke into the cabin even though none of the doors or windows had been tampered with.The camping trip then turned into a true nightmare....the campers were being accused of holding someone hostage and of not actually occupying the cabin. To make matters worse, a note on their car had the same picture that was on one of their camping companion's legs.....it was of Teilo, The King of the Fairies.When Sam and Phoebe arrived home from the camping trip, their house had been ransacked, but nothing had been taken....were they looking for the book? About a week later, Teilo also ransacked their friend Evie's place.As Phoebe found things out about Lisa's disappearance in Reliance, a town that has nothing left but foundations, more strange facts surfaced about the disappearance and of Lisa and Evie's childhood friendship. She even found things out about Sam that she really didn't want to know. Another phone call came from a girl/woman that urged Sam to meet her in the woods at their usual childhood place in Reliance. Things got a lot more involved after this most recent phone call.The book went back and forth from present-day events to events that took place 15 years ago when Lisa disappeared. The book was intense and mostly about changelings, how fairies live, and the puzzle that needed to be solved....the puzzle was: Where had Lisa been for 15 years, and were there really fairies doing all this damage and mind control?Even though this isn't my genre of choice the book's premise did get you hooked as you continued reading.You will find out that fairies are not a very nice sort of people. The book was somewhat “creepy.”This is one of the last entries in a Book of Fairies…it will show you the eeriness of the book.“If you have read this book all the way to the end, you know the truth. We are here, walking among you. We are stronger, faster, smarter. We walk with silent footsteps. We can see into your dreams. And we lie. Always remember that we lie.” 4/5

Fear the faeries. Seriously. I've been reading McMahon out of order, but with a dedication of a fan and a passion of a completist. And so, I've finally read this one and it definitely did not disappoint. McMahon is one of those authors that have impressively crossed over from the considerably more lucrative mystery genre into the realm of a much more niche literary horror. This is the book that really shows where and how that happened. On a fence, half and half, this is an irresistible and unputdownable blend of suspense and supernatural that she maintains right up until the very end, instead of opting for an easy way out with a logical all encompassing explanation that would have leveled out this to a mystery thriller. McMahon is an equally talented author in descriptions, character development and dialogue, something that's been consistent throughout her work. I didn't love all of her books the same, but this one really engaged me. Something about the sustained sense of paranoia, of not being quite sure what's going on as her characters are taken on a wild ride of exploring some profoundly disturbing family secrets just made this such a riveting read. Even though I had my suspicions and was mostly right about them, more often than not there was this WTF is going on feel to it that is just perfect for this sort of a book. Psychology behind abduction stories is always interesting, in a morbid sort of way. McMahon's spin on it is really something frightening and original as the certain terrible patterns repeat themselves and victims become violators. This book does a great job of questioning the guilt and responsibility of minds shaped (or misshaped as the case may be) so young, the nature over nurture age old argument, the relations and relationships that bind and scar. Emotionally brutal, thrilling work of suspense. Recommended.