Review: The Madness Underneath by Maureen Johnson

Waiting for a sequel can be painful. Just when you thought everything had resolved in the first first book, it plot-twisted unexpectedly, leaving you feeling like the sabre-toothed squirrel in the Ice Age movies. You need to read the second, because you need. to know. what happens. next.

The Name of the Star wasn’t like this for me. Everything resolved neatly in the end, so when I found out about the second book I was interested instead because I loved Rory’s point of view and had fallen in love with the setting and Maureen Johnson’s take on the whole realm of ghosts.

The Madness Underneath started much like The Name of the Star, from a seemingly random Londoners perspective, right before they’re murdered in a strange way. I thought, “ooh, here we go,” expecting a thrilling buildup to when we would find the killer in the grand finale. To my disappointment, Rory solved and dealt with the crime almost instantly.

So where was the story going?

This is the biggest problem I had with this book. A large portion of it just felt a bit directionless. I liked to see Rory discovering the world around her, but 80% of the book consisted of Rory being concerned with her slipping grades and not much else. The story became Rory’s transition from confused and impassive to more confused and more impassive. What I really wanted to see was Rory’s journey to coming to terms with who she was. I wanted to see her get stronger and take more initiative.

The eventual climax of the book was interesting, but I didn’t feel scared enough about Rory being safe from the antagonist because there wasn’t enough buildup. It didn’t even feel like what happened at the end was the central problem of the book. And then the book ended in an entirely different direction than I would have imagined, and not in an awesome plot-twisty way. It seemed more of an afterthought, an addition that was compelling, but still felt out of place in all that had happened up to that point.

It wasn’t a bad book, and I would be interested in reading the third, because I really do enjoy Rory as well as Boo, Callum, Stephen. I would hope in the third book that we will see more of these side characters, because though all of them made appearances every now and then, they were very hidden away in their own lives, and other than with Stephen, none of them continued to be as fleshed out as they were in the Name of the Star.

If you are interested in the series I think you will enjoy The Madness Underneath, even though it did seem to suffer a bit from second-book syndrome in the way that it didn’t provide much of an impact. Hopefully the third will make it worth sticking around.

ARC was acquired via NetGalley. Thank you!