Title: Sanctum (Asylum #2)

Author: Madeleine Roux

Publisher: HarperCollins 2015

Genre: YA Horror

Pages: 368

Rating: 3/5 stars

Reading Challenges: Unread Shelf Project; Unread Shelf Project Reading Challenge - Backlist title; Winter TBR

Dan, Abby, and Jordan remain traumatized by the summer they shared in the Brookline asylum. Much as they'd love to move on, many questions remain, and someone is determined to keep the terror alive, sending the teens photos of an old-timey carnival, with no note and no name. Forsaking their plan never to go back, the teens return to New Hampshire College under the guise of a weekend for prospective students, and there they realize that the carnival from the photos is not only real, it's here on campus, apparently for the first time in many years.

Sneaking away from sample classes and college parties, Dan and his friends lead a tour of their own—one through the abandoned houses and hidden places of a surrounding town. Camford is hiding a terrible past, and the truth behind Dan's connection to the asylum's evil warden is more terrifying than Dan ever imagined.

And with this book, I am officially DNFing the rest of the Asylum series. The first book I enjoyed. It was a YA Horror book with an intriguing setting, plotline, and characters. I couldn’t wait to see what happened next. Well it turns out, almost the exact same things. Our three friends show back up at Brookline after receiving vaguely sinister messages in the mail. Instead of talking about things and attempting to get ahead of the mystery, Abby and Jordan spend half the book not believing Dan (seeing ghosts, hearing voices, etc) and Dan spends most of the book trying to figure out if his friends are actually his friends. that’s what we did in the first book. At this point in the series, I wanted to see a lot more character growth. The lack of growth and unity among the friends distracted me enough that I couldn’t really get into the actual mystery. By the end of the book, I realized that I have no desire to find out what happens to the characters. Three books taken off my UnRead Shelf.

Asylum:

• #0.5 Escape from Asylum

• #1 Asylum

• #1.5 The Scarlets

• #2 Sanctum

• #2.5 The Bone Artists

• #3 Catacomb

• #3.5 The Warden

Next Up on the TBR Pile: