A 2021 Aurora Best YA Novel nominee, this is a very promising debut novel from Rhonda Parrish. The main character, the survivor of a tragic car accident, discovers a camera with strange properties in a spooky abandoned hospital. I found this novel to be a page-turning and suspenseful thriller. ( )

I'm not sure which is more horrific: high school, or the supernatural horror that manifests from a creepy abandoned hospital. Fortunately, Rhonda Parrish nails both in her young adult novel Hollow. This book is deep. It's scary. It makes me mad at times. IT IS SO GOOD. I first read it years ago as a draft, and it was wonderful to read it again in published form.

The premise is this: Morgan is a teenage girl. Her family has been shattered by a horrible car accident that killed her brother and paralyzed her mother. Morgan is dodging an abusive ex who took more than her heart. She's dealing with high school, and all the gossip and crap there on a daily basis. As if that isn't bad enough, when she hides inside the creepy abandoned hospital in her neighborhood, she finds an old camera. As an avid photographer, she can't help but start using it. When her photographic subjects change in terrible ways, she realizes she's not simply taking people's pictures, but something far more important.

As dark as the book can be, I really appreciated the overall message of empowerment and hope. Life sucks, yes, but you have friends and family, and you can get by. That seems more poignant these days than ever before. ( )

Morgan is sixteen, and Amy, her sister is 7. There was once Aric, a little brother. But a tragic car accident has shattered the family. Suddenly, her brother’s dead, her mom's a quadriplegic and paralyzed in more ways than one. Her dad consumes himself with long long hours at work.
Then there is high school which is its own special kind of hell, where her ex-boyfriend thinks it’s fun to spread rumors that shred Morgan’s reputation and bottoms out her already low self esteem.
Her home is located by an old abandoned, burned out hospital that once housed a psychiatric ward. The hospital is said to be haunted and cursed even from the day it was being built. A bizarre set of circumstances lead Morgan to venture into this scary place. Morgan is a photographer and when she happens upon an old Polaroid camera in one of the creepy rooms, she is intrigued by the relic. She takes it home and now her luck goes from bad to worse.
Amazingly, the camera works and is loaded with film. After taking a few pictures Morgan begins to realize that after she photographs a person or in one case an animal, they become corrupted versions of themselves. It's like the camera steals their goodness, their essence, and leaves them hollow.
The weirdness really heats up when Morgan arrives home one day to find that her sister has used the camera to take a selfie.
Can Morgan will find a way to reverse the effects of the cursed camera and save Amy, before her already-fractured family completely self-destructs.
This reminds me of The Twilight Zone or in more modern days a Black Mirror episode.
I think the YA audience will be drawn to this high school drama/thriller. ( )