Title: Feral
Author: Holly Schindler
Series: Standalone
Genre: YA Thriller
Format: Hardcover, 432 pages
Release Date: August 26th 2014
Publisher: HarperTeen
Source: eARC received from publisher via Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review

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The Lovely Bones meets Black Swan in this haunting psychological thriller with twists and turns that will make you question everything you think you know.

It’s too late for you. You’re dead. Those words continue to haunt Claire Cain months after she barely survived a brutal beating in Chicago. So when her father is offered a job in another state, Claire is hopeful that getting out will offer her a way to start anew.

But when she arrives in Peculiar, Missouri, Claire feels an overwhelming sense of danger, and her fears are confirmed when she discovers the body of a popular high school student in the icy woods behind the school, surrounded by the town’s feral cats. While everyone is quick to say it was an accident, Claire knows there’s more to it, and vows to learn the truth about what happened.

But the closer she gets to uncovering the mystery, the closer she also gets to realizing a frightening reality about herself and the damage she truly sustained in that Chicago alley….

Holly Schindler’s gripping story is filled with heart-stopping twists and turns that will keep readers guessing until the very last page.


I will admit that this book was weird. I honestly did not expect what I got when I started this one. First of all there are two narrators in this book, one is alive and one is dead. I thought the dead girls parts were a bit too much for me, and i found it to be too weird for my tastes. Although it gave a very interesting perspective on what happened to this girl, i still felt disconnected to this story, right from the beginning.

What I think I loved the most about this book was the murder mystery aspect of the book. As a reader we know aspects of the murder than the character did not, which I thought was interesting, but we still had to find out who was behind it, and we found that out along with the characters. That I really liked. I think that aspect of the book was the reason I kept reading. And when the killer was finally revealed it made so much sense. It felt real and like it could happen in real life, even though the circumstances were a bit out there.

There is a reason that this book is called Feral and that is because this book has a lot of to do with cats and feral cats. I found this aspect to be the weirdest part of the book because I really didn't connect with it. I found myself rolling my eyes when these parts would come and especially when the dead girl BECAME one of the cats. That was my braking point and I knew I wasn't going to like this book was much as I wanted. Overall this book was crazy interesting and I loved the murder mystery aspect to it, but I was taken aback by the cats involvement into the story and the fact that none of the characters really connected with me on any level.