In 1986, Eddie and his friends are just kids on the verge of adolescence. They spend their days biking around their sleepy English village and looking for any taste of excitement they can get. The chalk men are their secret code: little chalk stick figures they leave for one another as messages only they can understand. But then a mysterious chalk man leads them right to a dismembered body, and nothing is ever the same.
In 2016, Eddie is fully grown, and thinks he’s put his past behind him. But then he gets a letter in the mail, containing a single chalk stick figure. When it turns out that his friends got the same message, they think it could be a prank . . . until one of them turns up dead.
That’s when Eddie realises that saving himself means finally figuring out what really happened all those years ago.
I debated whether or not to review this book and eventually came down on the side that I would. My trouble lay in the fact that I neither hated nor loved this book, in fact I really just feel quite indifferent to it.
It started well and it had my attention, I was enjoying reading it and the characters are interesting and humanly flawed. Then I put it down to go do whatever it was I was doing and I wasn’t that interested in picking it up again. I did, however pick it up again only to find that pattern repeated itself from there, until eventually at about 3/4 of the way through I think this has become a DNF for me. Its been a couple of days now and I have absolutely no desire to pick it up and carry on reading.
Whats difficult is pinpointing why? As I mentioned above, the characterisations are good, it had some surprising moments, some touching moments and the unravelling mystery was enjoyable – all while I was actually reading it. I’ve come to the conclusion that the authors style maybe didn’t work very well for me and that’s why its just not grabbing me. Or maybe I’m just not in the right mood to enjoy it.
So a DNF from me but it isn’t a bad book.
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