Book Review
Title: Nothing but Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw
Genre: Horror, Paranormal, Folklore
Rating: 2 Stars
I recently watched a vlog of BooksandLala reading Nothing but Blackened Teeth and she was disappointed with it, as it has been on my TBR for a little while I thought I’d pick it up and see what I thought of it as we have similar reading tastes when it comes to horror. The opening of Nothing but Blackened Teeth was interesting as we are introduced to our protagonist, Cat, who has been flown to Japan for the wedding of her friend. The group numbers five, Cat, rich boy Phillip, her best friend Lin, and the “happy couple” Faiz and Talia. There is some bad blood between the group as Cat previously tried to break up Talia and Faiz because she felt they weren’t a good fit as they were always fighting. As a result of this, Talia doesn’t like Cat and didn’t want her at the wedding but Phillip who previously had a brief fling with Talia after he split up from Cat gets Talia to get let Cat attend.
Cat also has a complicated mental health history as she previously tried to kill herself and Phillip seems to be having a problem in processing that and doesn’t really know how to act around Cat because of this. The wedding in question is taking place at a haunted mansion in Japan where a wedding once took place but the husband die on route so the bride to be had the wedding guests bury her alive until her husband’s soul returned home. This spooks Cat as she has been hearing a voice speaking to her in Japanese since she arrived at the mansion and Talia’s suggestion of ghosts stories isn’t helping that. Cat had previously mentioned to Faiz that having the wedding here wasn’t a good idea and she feels they are all going to regret that decision sooner or later. At this point we are halfway through the book and apart from some whispered words we haven’t seen any paranormal activity and the things we have read could just be Cat imagining them as she has mentions problems with hallucinations in the past.
Things get really weird really quickly as Talia is replaced with the ghost bride and they have to perform a ritual in order to get Talia back which leads to the death of one of the group. After covering their tracks everyone else return home and has to deal with the consequences of their stay in the mansion but Cat is the only one that believes that the ghost bride followed them back. Overall, Nothing but Blackened Teeth had a lot of potential but it needed to be longer, we needed more backstory and character development especially between Faiz and Cat, as well as between Talia and Phillip we needed more solid explanation on the ghost bride and the ritual involved and it needed a more concrete ending. For me there was a lot of style over substance which meant the book was delightful to read but there wasn’t really any content and it left me feeling disappointed by the ending.
Buy it here:
Paperback/Hardcover: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
Kindle Edition: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
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