Joy's Reviews > Horseman: A Tale of Sleepy Hollow

I'm done with this. I'm around 85% done, and I've gotten to the point that it is painful picking it up. I'm avoiding the couch and reading. I'd rather do anything else.

I love Henry's books. I consider her Alice books among my top pick favorites. They are full of dangerous, yet strong, believable characters all wrapped up in magical fairy tale worlds. I like her writing enough that I forgave most of her sins in The Girl in Red.

Now we've come to this. Why was this published in book form? This should have been a short story at best, or at least a novelette. A short story could have been a teaser, released around Halloween to draw in and introduce new readers to Henry's normally excellent writing to a wider audience. Irving's Sleepy Hollow story is such a widely known and shared story around Halloween and would have been perfect.

Her simple rewrite could have been awesome without the over-ripe plot exposition, ridiculous red herrings and Ben's devotional fawning. It could have been much more enlightening and frightening if it played it straight to the morals and conventions of the day in the thoughts of Ben during her blooming sexuality and gender confusion. Instead, it was simply annoying because Henry applied modern morals and conventions across the board, with only a small nod to how the larger community of Sleepy Hollow functioned in the late 1700s immediately following the Revolutionary War. The original story came from of the Revolution. If Henry referenced the Revolution, I missed it.

There was so much potential within the story to become a step toward Ben's acceptance by the wider community to do her own thing, but she just came off as annoying and spoiled, slavishly following in her Grandfather's footsteps. It irritated me to no end that she was clueless and incurious about her extended family. She fawned over her male relatives to the point that her own story was lost. Her interest in her mother and grandmother came only when her male relatives failed at something.

If you are going to deny your main character an interesting and rich life in your story, please, just write a short story, don't make us endure a two-dimensional little brat with zero self-awareness.

I honestly hope that Henry's editors wake up because I genuinely love her writing and her gritty retelling. I sincerely hope that 'Horseman' is just a horrible anomaly in her catalog.

I'm having a really hard time finding a book to follow this. It's been two days and I have yet to find one. This is making me exceedingly grumpy.