Hollow by Ava Conway

 Girl, Interrupted meet Beautiful Disaster in this thrilling and sexy debut novel, in which a college student learns her perfect life is a lie and finds new love where she least expects it—a mental institution.

Freaks, misfits, and psychopaths. Those are the kinds of people found at Newton Heights Psychiatric Hospital, and high-society girl Lucy White’s new home.

Freaks, misfits, and Jayden McCray. Jayden has his own set of rules for life at Newton Heights, and in this enigma, Lucy finds a way to live with the events that left her cheating boyfriend and best friend dead—and Lucy in the middle of the investigation into their demise.

The problem? Jayden makes her want things she’s not supposed to have, blurring the lines between fantasy and reality and making Lucy feel more at home in Newton Heights than she ever did at home. But this isn’t how her life is supposed to be…

Or is it?

I’m not entirely sure of how I feel about this book. Hollow tells us the story of Lucy White. After a tragic night, she finds herself being investigated for manslaughter. At the advice of her attorney and the insistence of her mother, she admits herself to a mental institution. Once there, Lucy faces the monumental task of finding herself – an objective made that much more difficult each time her mother visits and reveals family secrets. Ms. Conway made it easy to hate Lucy’s mother. The woman was so self-involved that it blew my mind – and I have known some extremely self-involved people. I was not surprised that Lucy finally went off on her mother; frankly, I was surprised it took her that long.

If Lucy’s mother represented the dark cloud in her life, Jayden was her light. While I liked Jayden’s protectiveness of others, especially Flynn, Nesto, and Lucy, and the way in which he found his place within the ward, I never quite connected with him. Or Lucy for that matter. I enjoyed their relationship – the way they bantered, the way they listened to one another, the way they gave the other hope – but something was missing for me that prevented me from connecting the characters fully. Normally I would give a book like this 3 stars for being a good read. However, this is a really well-written book and I did enjoy it. I actually loved the way in which Ms. Conway ended the book. As odd as this may sound, I don’t want to read the sequel if it’s about Lucy and Jayden. I don’t want to know what happens to them next. I like their story as it is … ending in hope and THAT is why I gave Hollow four stars.

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At fourteen, Ava snuck her first romance novel into bed and read it by flashlight. There she met her first "book boyfriend" and has been hooked on reading ever since. She often prefers book-boyfriends to the real thing, and believes that a gooey, fudge brownie is a little piece of heaven on earth. When she's not writing, she's stumbling through her Zumba class (have to work off those brownies somehow), obsessing over the latest PINK song, or feeding her addiction for reality television.

Note: Ava also writes erotic romances for her over-eighteen fans as Suzanne Rock. See her kinkier side by checking out her website.

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