Negative Space by Mike Robinson

One fine day, I got an email from the Curiosity Quills team, inviting me to read and review Negative Space and the next book, Waking Gods. Feeling curious as to what book it was, I went to look at the first book, and lo and behold, I gave it a really good rating. Five stars, in fact. So obviously I said yes and accepted the ebooks.

At first, I was a bit afraid that having more or less forgotten the first book, I wouldn't have been able to follow the second, but it was totally not the case. As far as I can tell, Negative Space is totally different from the first book, since it's about paintings while the first was about drawings. I think the only common point they had was the location, and the hinting that there is something bigger working behind the scenes. I did not see any strange invisible grandfathers though.

Basically, Negative Space revolves around a painter, Max Higgins, and his possibly half-sister Karen. Max paints faces of missing people into his paintings, which I'm sure everyone recognises as 'not normal'. After he's featured in an art magazine, one of his faces appear, claiming to be his half-sister. But before he even gets to digest the information, they go on a search for their father. Oh, and his half-sister, Karen, is being stalked by a creepy client.

I still don't quite understand how things work, but there's a third book so I'm willing to stay ignorant until the end of the trilogy, where I expect everything will be revealed. I'd say that apart from the missing faces, and the creepiness of Max and Karen's father, the book seemed... not that out of the ordinary. Yes, there were messed up people, but is that really because of some malevolent force working behind the scenes? It could be yes, it could be no. I'm not sure which.

Overall, I have to admit that this was a very compelling read. I was very interested in finding out what's really going on, and I liked Max and Karen as characters. Since I have a copy of the third books (which thankfully had one day left to be downloaded after the copy I downloaded to Overdrive became unusable thanks to Overdrive crashing every single time I started the app), I can't wait to read it.

Disclaimer: I got a free copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for a free and honest review.