Review: A Creepy, Fast-Paced Story!
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 09 19, 2011
House Trap starts off with a flashback of a young boy named Nicolas and a tragedy he faces at a young age. Flash-forward 30 or so years and we now learn of a young girl named Rachel. Rachel is a closed-off, over achieving student trying her hardest to get great grades in high school so that she can attend Dartmouth, a prestigious college. While I think Rachel was meant to come across as a hard-working teenager with good goals in sight, I found her rather difficult to connect with. Her attitude towards fellow classmates, her mother, and her younger brother was quite harsh. If she had a bit of a softer personality I feel like I could relate to her a little better.Rachel agrees to help tutor a fellow classmate, Alicia. Alicia is the daughter of Nicolas, the young boy we learned of in the prologue. Due to the horrific events he faced as a child, he dedicated his whole life to creating home security systems to help protect families from intruders. His most famous creation is House Trap, a system of metal doors and windows that closes off all access points to the outside world. If there is an intruder outside you just activate House Trap and there will be no possible way for them to enter the house. Unfortunately for Rachel, Alicia, and Alicia's two younger siblings Nathan and Amy, the intruders were locked inside the house with them when House Trap was activated. This story follows Rachel on her mission to free them from the house before the intruders can get to them.I thought the idea of the House Trap security system was very unique. The intruders being locked inside the house with them made the story very thrilling and exciting. I quickly read through it trying to figure out if they would make it out of the house alive. Even though I had a lot of issues connecting with the main character Rachel, she grew on me a little as the story progressed. We could see her worry, fear, and compassion for Nathan and Amy as she tried to protect them.I did find quite a few errors in the story. There were very few spelling mistakes but there was a lot of grammar, punctuation, and consistency issues. I am normally not very picky of errors in spelling and grammar if there are a few mistakes here or there (we are all human; we all make mistakes, even me!) but this became a nuisance. Several times I found that wrong names were used, commas missing, some words were misspelled etc.Yes I did find some issues with this story and main character but that should not deter you from reading it. It is a rather enjoyable, thrilling, fast-paced story!