Another book for the October season, the town of Sleepy Hollow revolves around All Hallow’s eve and hauntings all year round thanks to the town’s illustrious Van Tassel family and the legend of the Headless Horseman. It’s a small town, and a bit of a tourist trap not the natives like outsiders much despite relying on tourism.

Kat Van Tassel, the teenage descendants of the First Katrina feels stifled in the place. Every woman in her family is called Katrina, and they’re all expected to stay in Sleepy Hollow tending to the hearth and providing the rest of the town with jobs, crops and celebration. But Kat wants to travel, she wants to go to college and maybe become a writer even though she hasn’t confided that dream to anyone. But she’s torn with following her dreams and her family’s, hell the whole town’s, expectations that she’ll stay at home and marry her childhood best friend like all the Katrinas before. That fate of being trapped in this tiny town terrfies her more than all the ghosts in the graveyard.

It is during one fight about her desire to go to college that her mother gives her the First Katrina’s diary and Kat realizes how much her ancestor’s life and her current life converge to one and she wonders, is history repeating itself, will she travel Katrina’s same fate?

It took me a bit to warm up to Kat, she struck me as trying to hard as she talked about how different she was from the other Katrina. Not only being the first one who is willowy and brunette compared to the buxom blonde predessecores but how she fought against the stifling confines of the town. She doesn’t believe in the Sleepy Hollow ghosts and is annoyed by everyone else’s obssession with them as it borders on mass reverence from elders and making light of it from kids her age. She wants to be more progressive like going to college and is into reading history and silent films rather than raising the dead.

Honestly, she struck me as almost a carbon copy of Belle. Luckily, Valentino acknowledges the similarities as she positons B&B as Kat’s favorite movie as she understands Belle’s feelings of being stuck in a provincial town.

Plus as the story goes on, she gathrs layers especially in seeing things from other points of view when she reads Katrina’s diary. Like when she looks at her mother, she sees her as a true Katrina, always smiling and making sure everyone is happy and comfortable. She wonders if it’s an act but its clear that her mother loves and embraces that role.

Which leads to, “She was different from the other Katrinas. She knew that. She even revealed in it. But there was still part of her thst wondered if she would ever live up to their legacy, because there was a part of her that wanted to carry it on. She just had to figure out how she could do that snd live the life she wanted,” (38).

That’s what it is all about fate, legacy and the past haunting the present.

Kat is more than the cliche rebellious teenager, she does care about her town and the beauty of the legacy even if she tires of it dictating everything else in her life. There’s also the complication of relationships. Like the oirginal Katrina, she is best friends with Blake which has grown to a relationship which everyone expects them to marry someday.

The thing is, she loved Blake when they were young and had fun but now Blake is just a jerk. They have nothing in common and he belittles her passions and dreams of leaving the town. Worse, he’s a gaslighter, making her think she’s forgetting things and selfish for not doing what he wants, that she’s the bad person in the relationship not him. And then cries and prays on her sympathies when she tries to break away from him.

Not that she really realizes Blake’s manipulative actions. At first, Kat does believe she is a forgetful bad girlfriend compounded by being a disappointing daughter and possibly losing her mind since she has an eerie feeling that someone is watching her.

Luckily, the new girl Isadora Crow opens her eyes in a sweet but rather quick relationship switch once she opens her eyes to Blake’s gross actions.

I do like that after Kat realizes her burgeoning feelings for Isadora that they take their relationship slow with her questioning if this is right. Not because of Blake, Blake is awful but she wonders if she is just jumping into another relationship too fast because she’s used to being the role of someone’s girlfriend and that perhaps she should take time to find herself and be the brave girl that she wants to be and that Isadora believes she is.

This is a good comparison to the past revealed in Katrina’s diary. Her relationship with Brom follows the same strand as childhood friends who shared everything who begin to drift apart to the point that Katrina detests the staid nature of their relationship and Brom’s jockish, brutish personality that disregards her feelings and desires. Mr. Ichabod Crane is a refreshing novelty who shares her love of reading, encourages her dreams of travelling outside the town and just respects her as a person with a brain.

But once again, things twist as Ichbod reveals himself to be the greedy, full of himself intellectual who thinks himself above the simple folk of Sleepy Hollow and Katrina begins to re-evaluate her frayed relationship with Brom as one of non-communication and that her breakup must have come out of no where to Brom because she didn’t tell him about her dissatisfaction. Basically, relationships are complicated and as hard as it is to be vulnerable and share your feelings, its needed to make it work in the long-run.

It’s clear that Valentino is enjoying herself when she expounds on the All Hallow’s Eve celebration and Sleepy Hollow’s unique traditions like divinition in math class and haunted legends are given as much importance in history class as the Revolutionary War. She also adds such figures as Headmaster Toad and his fidgety assistant, Mr. Angus that reminds Kat of a badger.

If they sound familiar that’s because it references the Disney movie The Adventures of Mr. Ichabod and Mr. Toad which is two stories in one. Yes, one’s the Sleepy Hallow story and another about the titular anthromorphic toad with a love for automobiles. It’s a cute detail that made the story all the more enjoyable. Also a cute trivia note is the appearance of family friend of the colonial Van Tassels, Mr. Irving. Mr. Irving being the author of the original tale.

Overall, Valentino blends plenty of interesting themes such as gaslighting and toxic relationships and a coming of age tale asking questions about fate and conflicting duty between responsibility and your own desires.

Unfortunately the writing is a bit simplistic and shys away from following through. Since the story takes place over three days in present-day time, it feels like Valentino does more telling than showing. Having the readers tell each other what they must be feeling in order to move the story along.

It also feels like a PSA about gaslighting and emotional abuse with several internal monologues and dialogues about how good it feels to be believed, how hard it must have been to be treated as insane. It feels non-organic as it has only been a day since Kat broke up with Blake. It feels like she should be taking a longer time in coming to terms with the abuse, the guilt she must feel because Blake has conditioned over the years to blame herself for his actions (again, he is awful), and that it would be harder to break away from him.

It just feels like Valentino skipped over to the recovery and the healing just as she shys away from all the other interesting themes of relationship complications and hints of panic and anxiety. Amazon says the reading age is for grades 7-12 and it shows in how Valentino hints at these older themes but sticks to the 7th grade level.

Furthermore, the forshadowing is nice with the mention of the old film, Gaslight hinting at this big theme. And there’s the characters having the same intials as their predessecors which felt too obvious in the case Isadora’s real origins that Kat should have figured out for herself. I guess that’s why Valentino kept her in a dizzy tumult of feelings most of the time so she’d be too distracted to figure it out.

There’s also a lot repetition in Valentino’s writing like Kat thinking about how she doesn’t want to push Isadora in sharing her secrets and its repeated again on the next page or in the next paragraph. Just lot of repetition stuck out to me as something that should have been caught in editing.

Valentino is best with description and delving into the past of Sleepy Hollow with Katrina’s diary (even though it was sometimes anachronistic like Katrina wanting to emulate the notorious pirate Mary Read to better match the modern ideals Kat and the readers would have). Her writing of the present day has intriguing concepts but shies away or was kept from probing them deeper which was disappointing.

Although it does end with the implication of more Sleepy Hollow Mysteries to come. Whether it means a sequel is in the works or another amibiguous ending befitting the spooky tale tradition remains to be seen. But if Kat returns for another adventure, I hope Valentino will be allowed a deeper dive into real life horror as she is free to do with the supernatural scares.