Burn it to a CRISP- this book is absolute dogwater! 📖🔥->🗑️Lois, may she haunt the soul of the moron editor who reworked the book and tried to “modernize” it. 👻 Email and letters do not serve the same function, and “papers getting lost” is an 80s thing, the plot doesn’t work when you fast forward 30 years and computers have something called a “file”. A file is something that you can copy and paste- idiot editor did NOT get that!! 🤦Would Romeo & Juliet be cooler if they had AK’s and Te...

"Why would any woman laugh at the concept of something so gloriously so fulfilling as a mother's having her children with her forever?"Locked in Time by Lois Duncan One of Duncan's best.She crafts an incredible mystery using a wonderful premise combining a Historical element with the here and now and it is a page turner!First off, the whole story takes place in Louisiana , and the whole southern gothic element here is beautifully crafted.Nora knows there is something deeply wrong within the hous...

I'm reading all of my son's AR (for school) books with him so we can discuss and I can make sure he is actually reading rather than just flipping pages. Haha. He hasn't finished yet so it will be interesting to get his perspective. The book was interesting and fast paced enough to keep one reading but I had a few major issues with it. First, the entire book is premised on the idea that the only thing of concern for the female characters is maintaining or achieving physical beauty for the purpose...

So I've talked about my Joan Lowery Nixon phase before. I actually think I discovered Lois Duncan right before Nixon, but the two will always go hand and hand in my mind. Together they perfectly satisfied my twelve-year-old thirst for a light blending of suspense and the macabre. And no Duncan book did that better than the deliciously creepy LOCKED IN TIME. I enjoyed all of her books and they all succeeded in giving me the chills at one point or another. My old copy of I Know What You Did Last S...

01/2016

A gothic tale of being trapped in eternal life. About voodoo not vampires. This was a significant, formative book for me. I think I first read if when I was 10, then about four times between 10 and 13.

Plot:Nore Robbins spends the summer in down south Louisiana in order to get acquainted with her new step-family. She's a bit bitter that her father decided to remarry so soon after her mother's death, but tries to approach her step-mom and step-siblings with an open mind. Step-mom is a beautiful woman named Lisette Berge who has a teenage son named Gabe who clearly has the hots for his new stepsister and a young daughter named Josie, who's a sullen thirteen-year-old prone to throwing tantrums. T...

I've no idea why, but this book terrified me so badly as a child that I hid it behind my parents bookcase. I can't remember anything that scary about it, but I was literally afraid of the book itself.

I also thought for a while that the ghost of Abe Lincoln lived in my closet. I don't think a particular book caused that. I was just a very weird child.

Lois Duncan is good with building atmosphere, both environmental and emotional. The story was set in Louisiana and the descriptions of the surroundings and even the weather were very well done. Duncan also created a very creepy feeling from the very beginning, but I found the foreshadowing to be a bit heavy-handed.I might have really liked this book had I read it when I was in middle school. It doesn't seem childish or anything, but maybe shallow is how I would describe it. There's not much dept...

Fun fact: this is easily my favorite Lois Duncan book and it was the first one I read.It's just as suspenseful as her others, but it also is a little more Gothic. There's a big question (at least as I read it) about how much is real and how much is in Nore's imagination. (I love stories like that, where you're not entirely sure what the true story is.)And when I re-read it for this feature, it was so much scarier than I remembered it being. I feel like one of the creepiest things is the fact tha...

This is my least-favorite of Lois Duncan's books. It's also the only one I DIDN'T read as a teen since it was published after I had graduated from the YA section (and yes, there was a YA section at my library back in those olden days. YA DID exist pre-Twilight, you know). I don't know if this one packs less of a punch than her earlier works because it was written later in her career, or if Lois Duncan is best read when one is young and just discovering supernatural suspense fiction.I still LOVE ...