Sanctum by Madeleine Roux



It's nothing but pure boredom when you go inside the Sanctum, the fantasy novel and second book in the series by Madeleine Roux.

We are reunited with Dan, Abby, and Jordan after the horrible summer they spent at Brookline.  The three of them haven't been the same since they returned to their homes, having nightmares of the asylum they dormed in during the summer.  When Dan takes a trip to visit Felix, he realizes he and his friends have been given weird old-time carnival pictures.  Against their wishes, the three must travel back to Brookline, realizing the mystery is not over as the carnival returns to the campus for the first time since the 1920's.  Pretending to be students are considering going to the college, the travel back to the campus on a hunt that takes them all across abandoned houses in the neighborhood and even finding a secret group that has been around since the time of the carnival.  Is Dan's connection to the warden of Brookline worse than he expected?  Will the three of them find the reason they were meant to return to Brookline?

At first this book seemed promising.  Abby hearing the voice her Aunt Lucy.  Dan seeing the apparition of a young boy and going into places that are not there.  There was a mystery that I couldn't wait to discover when reading the book.  I wanted nothing more than to know why Felix sent Dan back to Brookline.  Roux grabbed my attention from the beginning with her writing, knowing how to grab the reader.

Unfortunately, that didn't last long.  What seemed to be fast paced then began to get slow.  The journal entries Dan was reading from Daniel, I don't know why Roux had to put so many in them.  A couple would've been fine enough, but chapters being devoted to only a journal entry, I found to be a waste of space.  More of a plot could've been used in those spaces.

Roux's writing disappointed me in this novel and I ended up skimming through the rest of the book, wanting to get it over with.  Many questions were left unanswered, it made wonder why these questions were even proposed in the book in the first place.  It left me unfilled and upset that this book wasn't as good as the first in the series.

I rated this book 3 out of 5 stars.  It had it's good points, but unfortunately the unneeded parts ruined the book for me.

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