This was something that was a favorite of mine as a child, so it was a nice nostalgic trip re-reading it as an adult.

 

I'm not generally a fan of poetry, but I enjoyed this quite a bit. The rhymes are pretty and I probably shouldn't really try to talk about poetry, because I have nothing to say on that front other than that.

 

My favorite poem is "The Swing," which my grandmother used to recite to me when she pushed me on the aforementioned object as a child, so it will always hold particularly fond memories for me.

 

In the end, this was a short but sweet trip down memory lane for me, and something I feel all children ought to be exposed to at some point. 

My server recently had a discussion about book titles that didn't fit the books they were for and this one definitely fits in that category. The pact? Don't worry about it. It's not relevant. 

The dialogue was just...a lot. There were so many lols and acronyms thrown in that seemed strange to say out loud (doubly so in the audiobook version!) in dialogue. It may (??) have been written the way people talk (teenagers talk), but the rest of it didn't feel natural, and I don't want people using lols and ums in my book anyway, to be honest. That's the fun part of reading. I don't need filler words. The back and forth in time was also annoying. I get that she's trying to communicate with her mother from a dream world (not a spoiler--this is obvious from page 1), but the sudden drop of memories and her constant "oh I wish I knew what happened" as a way of writing was unpleasant.

The characters were not fun to follow either.  I wanted to strangle two of the three main POVs all the time, and only one of them was a teenager, who may be forgiven for it. All three were boring, though, and that's the cardinal sin. 

The plot was pretty obvious from the start. I had someone pegged as a problem immediately and, surprise! they became a problem. Trying not to spoil anything here, so apologies for the vague language, but despite having a few small surprises, nothing about this was particularly shocking, and that's a problem with a thriller. 

I'm unimpressed enough I won't be picking up the rest of her oeuvre.

Despite the confusion I had over titles (wait, is this Murder on a Moon Trek or Fly Me To The Moon?), this was charming. 

I liked the fact that the action starts immediately and we get backstory as relevant. I liked the characters and their interactions. I liked that I didn't know immediately who'd done it and that there were several good options. I do think the main character made a few leaps of logic in some of her suppositions (there are only two options, and here they are, and it's very black and white and one of them is always that it is that person who did it), but sometimes you need to pack in some extra characters that could have committed the murder, so it is forgiven, especially in an early novel. 

I'll absolutely travel to whatever planet is next with Sylvia and the crew, though. 

It was nice to have a supernatural element in this, and seeing everything get wrapped up finally felt good.

This is not my favorite Stephen King series, and it's never going to be, but I enjoyed it. I prefer more sincere horror stories to his thrillers, though he does a mean thriller, don't get me wrong.

Bill Hodges is a good character, and Holly grew on me as the series progressed. She's still not my favorite (a bit too literal for me), but she does a good job of being Bill's foil in a lot of ways. She makes a good partner for him. 

For once I felt like King did stick the landing, which, bless him, he doesn't always do. I've never thought he was as bad as some people do, but I do know that he has his moments with it.