Star Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Emotional Rollercoaster Rating: 🎢🎢🎢
Would I Reread: Probably
2019 Reading Count: 9/25

General Info Section:

Sixteen year old Summer Robinson lived a normal life in the town of Long Thorpe with her parents Dawn and Daniel, older brother Henry, and Lewis, her boyfriend of a year and a half and the love of her life. You could say her life was perfect.

Long Thorpe was the type of town that nothing ever happens in. The biggest event that Summer can remember was when the oldest women in town went missing for 5 hours and was found in the middle of a field of sheep. Summer never imagined anything bad would happen in the town she grew up in…especially involving her disappearing without a trace late one night. No family or police investigation can track her down.

Summer is locked into a cellar with 3 other girls, and is now called Lily. The 3 other girls are known as Rose, Poppy and Violet. Their kidnapper, Clover, thinks of his victims as his family. A product of an abusive past himself, Clover finds women he thinks are perfect, like flowers, and kidnaps then to save them from a unperfect world. But one thing is for sure, flowers can’t survive long cut off from the sun, and time is running out…

The Short Review Section (NO SPOILERS!)

The Cellar by Natasha Preston in one word…WOW! I never ever thought in a million years that I would ever read a suspense novel and LIKE IT! I’m not saying this book is perfect by any means, but it opened me up to the genre of suspense and thrillers in such a breath taking way that I wanted more when it ended.

I think this is a book that can help introduce anyone into the genre of Suspense, Mystery, and Thriller. Like stated before I did not like that genre myself. I’m easily scared at this stuff and almost always convinced after I read it that it could happen to me the next day. Summer, the main character, is relatable and at the end of the story you are truly rooting for her and hope that she’s able to get out before anything terrible happens to her. You fall in love with her and Lewis getting together and you begin to feel like they are your two best friends that fell in love together and you want them to be successful and happy.

If anything, you’ll find yourself relating to at least one character in this book by the time you are done with it!

I believe, to the best of my knowledge, the facts and events that are stated are how they would truly treat a case like this. I think that detail itself makes the feelings you experience reading this real. Does it have the stereotypical kidnap novel sequence in it? Yes, but you start to forget about it when the next chapter comes up and you’re given more to the backstory and the main story. You truly try to piece the mystery together yourself.

In short, this is a book I believe everyone should at least try if not push through to the end. I thought I was going to HATE IT and be terrified the entire time reading it, but instead I felt as if I was searching for Summer with Lewis or fighting for my life inside the cellar. If a book is able to do that to you, then you know you’ve got to read it.

What I Think About This Book (WARNING SPOILERS!!)

Summer, as a character, is flawed. I do have to say I did want to scream at her many many times to stop crying and to be a grown up. Yes, I know being kidnapped is terrifying and that at the time she was only sixteen. Her emotions were valid and there’s no problem with raw emotions being shown on the page. What was annoying me so much was that Rose, Poppy, and Violet repetitively told her how she would be able to survive and she did the EXACT opposite most times and then cried and screamed when Clover was angry and took it out on the girls. Of course, this is fine the first time and throughout the first couple of months being locked up, but when Violet 2.0 came in and mixed the pot instead of just standing there like Rose and Poppy she fell to the floor and just cried. You would think that after being in there for a year, you would understand that you need to stay calm in order to survive. *

I do find Summer to be a very strong character at the same time as being annoyed with her. I think we truly see her grow into the fighter that she is by the end of the book and she uses her anger and pain of being locked up for so long to her advantage. I kind of felt like she was a bada** by the end of the girls time in the cellar! She was the only one that had any guts to fight Clover, and I fully think she is the reason the girls came out of there at the end.

The character that made me the saddest was Shannen, aka Rose. Her story was so different compared to the other girls in the room because she was thrown into the cellar by Colin’s fear of losing the one woman he loved besides his mother. The part that hurts the most is the fact that I believed she did loved him back. Thats why she didn’t want think about escaping when the girls talked about it, getting upset and walking out of the room, and when she did lose him (aka the girls were saved and Clover was arrested) she was driven to such a pain of lost that she ended up killing herself. This is the saddest part about Shannen’s storyline in this book. Not her being kidnapped, or being thrown into the cellar to become Rose (Which believe me, when I read that chapter I was sobbing) but that she let Clover has so much control over her that she completely lost who she was and began to think that she was Rose.

Of course, since she was in there the longest out of any of the girls it is completely logical that she would have gone crazy. Or is it? One of my theories is that she faked being “crazy” so that Clover would never hurt her. She knew that if she played along she would be fine because she knew the man behind Clover….Colin. When they were saved from the cellar, I think Rose struggled with not being able to find Shannen. She had been Rose for 3 years so she struggled with finding the way to be herself again. I think she also had PTSD from being locked up for so long and in order to get away from it, she turned to drugs and ended up dying from an overdose. SEE I TOLD YOU ROSE/SHANNEN’S STORY IS DEPRESSING AF.

My favorite character had to be hands down Poppy. She was such a devils advocate on both ends! She knew what she needed to do to stay alive around Clover but at the end when she teamed up with Summer/Lily to escape I was so proud of her. You see such a character growth with her that just makes you want to hug her. When Clover stabs her during the final fight, I sobbed because I thought she was for sure going to die and we had already lost Violet 1.0 (the saddest character death hands down). When we got to the hospital and she was fine I straight up hugged my iPad. Poppy was the sane other sister to Summer/Lily. Yes, Rose was there but as listed above…Rose was “craycray.”

Clover’s story confused me until I really sat down and thought about it. For me, I couldn’t tell if the relationship between his mother and him was more than a mother/son relationship.

For me, Clover ended up being like a Norman Bates type character. From only wanting to love his mother and no other woman but then falling for Shannen, I think Clover was trying to figure out how to escape from the hold his mother had on him, even from the grave. It felt like he was scared of her, and wanted out.

To sum it up, The Cellar is one book that I won’t forget anytime soon. Even as I’m writing this, its been a week since I’ve finished the book and I still get chills when walking home late at night by myself, or when I think about the storyline.

Please, if you ever have the chance to read this book, do it! This book will change your life.

*NOTE:
I think that Natasha was just trying to show her age difference compared to the other girls in the room so after sitting on this book for a couple of days after finishing this book and rereading this paragraph, I now understand what the author wanted to do with Summers character