The Chalk Man
Overview: In 1986, Eddie and his friends are just kids on the verge of adolescence. They spend their days biking around their sleepy English village and looking for any taste of excitement they can get. The chalk men are their secret code: little chalk stick figures they leave for one another as messages only they can understand. But then a mysterious chalk man leads them right to a dismembered body, and nothing is ever the same.
In 2016, Eddie is fully grown, and thinks he’s put his past behind him. But then he gets a letter in the mail, containing a single chalk stick figure. When it turns out that his friends got the same message, they think it could be a prank . . . until one of them turns up dead.
That’s when Eddie realizes that saving himself means finally figuring out what really happened all those years ago.
Pages: 288
Author: C.J. Tudor
Recommendations:
I’ve heard people compare this book to Stand by Me by Stephen King, but to me, it’s more like IT without all the killing. The story bounces back and forth between 1986 and 2016. In 1986, Ed is just a kid with a group of buddies, doing typical kid stuff like hanging out, going to the fair, and eating way too much junk food. But things take a turn when the gang starts communicating through chalk drawings, each with their own color and secret symbols. Of course, things get complicated real quick.
The summer of 1986 is full of twists and turns that change the lives of all the kids involved. Fast forward to 2016, and the events of the past come back to haunt them. Old wounds are reopened, new ones are formed, and it all revolves around a murder that happened back in ’86. A murder scene discovered by the gang through clues left in their chalk drawings.
This story is a real page-turner. I was hooked from the get-go, eager to see where it was all leading. Usually, there’s a section in a book that loses my interest, but not this one. I was invested in Eddie’s life from the very first page. And I’m not usually a fan of flashbacks, but in this book, they were seamlessly woven into the narrative. I was dying to see how the two timelines would come together.
Overall, the author nailed it with this book. The storytelling was top-notch, and I’m crossing my fingers for more from her in the future. I wouldn’t mind revisiting these characters again.