Christina Henry is prolific. Horseman is her second novel of 2021, following the fantastic Near the Bone, which is one of my favorite novels of the year so far. With Horseman, she is back to reimagining stories, and this time The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is getting the esteemed Henry treatment.

Teenage Ben is orphaned, living with his paternal grandparents in the small town of Sleepy Hollow. Sleepy Hollow is a place with a dark history, full of superstitious inhabitants, and a creepy set of woods. Things have been suspiciously quiet for a while, but when young boys begin to get murdered, old ghosts awaken. Ben must align the past with the present, and discover how his mysterious family history is central to the devastation in the hollow.

Horseman is centrally about two things; solving the mystery of who/what is responsible for the murders in Sleepy Hollow, and a coming-of-age story for Ben. Ben was born Bente, a female, and identifies as male. Ben’s struggle to convey his gender is well-balanced with his determination, and the unconditional love he receives from his grandfather, Brom. It also works very well alongside Ben’s journey to find out the truth about his deceased parents, and the weird connection he has with the woods. It’s essentially a continuous journey of discovery for Ben.

There is no doubt Christina Henry knows how to keep a reader captivated. It is impossible to stop reading at the end of a chapter, as Henry always urges the reader forward with a cliffhanger. Her writing is fluid and uncomplicated, and she develops well-rounded, lovable characters. And my word, she knows how to create a memorable violent image, and I am here for it!

But with all this being said, Horseman didn’t completely work for me. I love the character of Ben, and his relationship with his grandparents, but the story didn’t grip me quite as much as Henry’s previous novels. I found the story quite complex, and I often had to remind myself of a character’s previous actions. Admittedly, I’m not overly familiar with The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a prerequisite. I was along for the ride until about halfway through, I just didn’t remain captivated for the whole time.

If you’re an established fan of Christina Henry’s books such as Alice, The Girl in Red, or The Mermaid, you will probably appreciate Horseman. It’s an enjoyable book; Henry just blew me away so much with Near the Bone that my expectations were maybe a little high.

I’m a pretty big fan of Henry’s retellings. They don’t always stick to the script and stay mostly to the main, mental concepts, and even then, I find them enjoyable. The Horseman is one of those retellings, often pulling more from ideas from Sleepy Hollow rather than retelling the actual plot. The difference between Henry’s other books and this one though is the narration style. Instead of actions being shown to you, most of it is told to you. That form of info-dumping is something I loathe, and this is no exception.
I think my greatest frustration with this was the thought-dumping form of narration that made things feel like they were more or less serious than one would expect. It led me to not understand fully what was going on, and while I understood the twist, I didn’t enjoy it. There is no real pacing to this book that makes sense, and I don’t think I’ll think about it again any time soon.

I love a good re-telling of the horseman...we hear so many retellings that sometimes it can become overwhelming, but once I saw the cover, I knew I had to give this book a chance. We are introduced to Ben, the granddaughter of Brom. From the get-go, Ben has made it be known she is not going to be a female; she wants to be like her grandfather. Do everything he does and whatnot. She wants to play in the woods and get dirty, not sit around and learn to sew or wear pretty dresses. While playing in the woods, Ben feels as though something is watching her, and when the first body is found, well, you know the rest. Of course, the headless horseman is to blame. He always has been but, what if I was to tell you that something evil lurks in the woods, something that is not from this world, so to speak. Something so evil that touch will have your skin melting and your bones showing? An evil that will leave almost no trace of a body. As our story unfolds and we follow Ben, who sets out to pretty much get answers because she is an inquisitive person and doesn't believe the horseman is evil, we see just what Ben uncovers. I really enjoyed getting to the end and seeing how the author started shaping the town of Sleepy Hollow as times progress.

It is my standing opinion that any retelling of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories is better than the original. With intelligent prose and enveloping atmosphere, Christina Henry proves this theory true once again. In Horseman, the author delivers a thrilling version of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow that I couldn't put down!

From the first pages, this novel drew me in. The worldbuilding is sublime, immersing the reader fully into this spooky little village on the cusp of autumn. Change is in the air, and a sense of eerie foreboding. The plot kicks up right away and rolls smoothly throughout, never seeming too slow or too fast: just right, always.

I liked the timeline of this novel, particularly in two aspects. 1) Using Brom Bones' grandchild as the narrator is a brilliant move! It keeps us readers closely connected to the legend we know while adding a fresh point of view. 2) Skipping ahead in time with our narrator and their relations adds another layer of connection between the reader and Ben. By the end of the book, Ben feels more like a person than a character. Very well done!

Lastly, some notes on Ben, or Bente, our narrator. Casual non-cis pride! Ben is a strong character in this novel for multitudinous reasons, and their gender identity (though not a key factor to the plot as far as I can see) is certainly a part of this impact. Basically, I love Ben. You go, kid!

Horseman is my favorite take on The Legend of Sleepy Hollow thus far! I can hardly wait to get my hands on more material by Christina Henry!

Considering how much I like this author, this was a big disappointment.

Ben has been living with his grandparents Brom and Katrina from "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" fame since his parents' death. The day he discovers a headless child in the forest, his life changes.

I spent most of the book questioning Ben's age. He's supposed to be fourteen years old but acts like an eight-year-old. It doesn't help that this takes place in a time when childhood wasn't much of a thing. Does he act this immaturely because he's trans and/or comes from a rich family? I couldn't figure it out. Katrina was mean, and I couldn't trust how Ben portrayed Brom.

The storyline of what was happening in Sleepy Hollow was interesting and fast-paced. But I didn't care what happened to the characters.

Review based on an advanced reader copy provided through Netgalley for an honest review.

DNF @30%
While it was nice to visit with Bram and Katrina after all these years the narrative of their grandchild is slow and draggy. Too much telling, not enough showing. I'm not convinced any horror reader would consider this to be "terrifying" as claimed

"There was a contagion in the very air that blew from that haunted region; it breathed forth an atmosphere of dreams and fancies infecting all the land." - The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving

The Horseman is not a re-telling of Washington Irving's Sleepy Hollow but a tale which takes place twenty years after the events of that book. Those who live in Sleepy Hollow know about the Horseman, but they don't believe in his existence. Ben Van Brunt's grandfather, Brom Bones was there when Crane was chased out of town. He will tell you it's just a legend. Nothing to concern yourself with.

Ben Van Brunt, born a female declared "No one was ever going to make me be a female.... Once I was old enough, I was going to cut my hair and run away and be a man in some place where no one had ever heard of me." Ben loves his grandfather more than anything and wants to grow up and be the man that Brom is. Ben is brave, he is strong, and big for his age. He is the target for some in town but proves time and time again that the Van Brunt’s are not to be messed with.

When Ben and a close friend come across the body of a headless child near their village, Ben begins to question everything the adults in Sleepy Hollow have ever said. Is the Horseman real? Is there something more sinister in the woods?

"Sleepy Hollow strange things were true, and sometimes those strange things reached out their claws. If wasn't that people didn't care; it was that they accepted horror in exchange for wonder."

Those in town would tell you to watch where you go in the woods. To beware a certain area. There is a magic there, something that haunts the far woods. If you are quiet, if you listen closely, you can hear the whispers. Be still, and you can almost feel the invisible hands reaching out to grab you. There is a part of the Hollow that no one dares enter. You wouldn't want to lose your head, would you?

"But the woods near Sleepy Hollow were not the same as other woods. There were places deep and dark that no one dared go. No one dared go there because it was known that those places were the haunts of creatures not of this earth. To go there was to invite their notice, and these were not things that you wanted to notice you."

I loved this dark tale that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I could hear the horses thundering hooves. I could feel the tingles up my spine. There is an urgent sense of danger, dread, and doom in this book. Horseman: A Tale of Sleepy Hollow has a dark and sinister feel to it. The atmosphere brings forth feelings of fall, cooler nights and darker skies.

But this book is not all scary. Sure, there are some chilling and dreadful scenes. But this book is also about family, about loving someone, about being true to yourself, about acceptance, about bravery and friendship. That is what makes this book even more powerful - the relationships of Ben, Katrina and Brom. It's quite lovely to read their scenes and be witness to their love, to root for them, to be moved by them.

This book was a five-star read for me for most of the book but it lost me a little toward the end. Mainly because it slows down slightly and felt a little stretched out before another major scene occurred at the end. Having said that, this was such a great book. Those silent hands reached out and grabbed me pulling me into the pages of this book.

Gripping, dark, tense and oh so deliciously wicked!


Thank you to Berkley Books and NetGalley who provided me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. All the thoughts and opinions are my own.

In horseman feels like almost a sequel to the original sleepy hollow or made me a continuation. So those who wonder what happened after the original sleepy hollow this would be a great book for you. Horseman is creepy and atmospheric definitely the perfect book for Halloween time. I myself couldn't really relate to Ben as a character but that's all right. Would I recommend this book? Yeah, if what you're looking for is a sequel to sleepy hollow but if you're looking for a more modern version of anything then no I would not recommend.

Thank you to netgalley and the publisher for this Arc and exchange for an honest review

If you like stream-of-consciousness narration this is a solid read, and I can't fault the quality of the prose. The mystery/supernatural aspect was clearly solvable almost from the outset, but ONLY if you know your tropes. Sadly, this means either you know what is going on and therefore the narrative is slow, or you don't know the formula and therefore the end feels like a sudden reinvention of the facts. Some interesting components were mixed in there (I would have loved more about the historical presentation of gender-nonconforming people) but overall, it was a long read for a resolution that didn’t hit the mark for me.

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<blockquote>...it was a foolish thing, a childish thing, to think that monsters only showed their teeth at night.</blockquote>

even though my brain knows that [book:The Legend of Sleepy Hollow|93261] is set in new york, it FEELS like such a new englandy story, and growing up, whenever the wretched summer finally ended, making way for the cozier fall; the leaves flaring before crisping, the scent of autumnal spices on the air, there you would find young karen, sipping warm cider on a horse-drawn haunted hayride, listening to someone read aloud the tale of ichabod crane and the headless horseman.

because of this, i've always had a nostalgic fondness for the story, so i was over the moon excited to read this book—the cover gave me full-body shivers, and i loved henry's [book:Lost Boy: The True Story of Captain Hook|32828538] and was excited to see where she'd take this material.

<img src="https://media.giphy.com/media/j5KbxvtZiY3m2z8AfR/giphy.gif"/>

i didn't...love this one.

there's not much retelling going on here. it's more of a "what came after" story that checks in on sleepy hollow twenty years later, when brom and katrina's fourteen-year-old grandchild ben starts questioning what she's been told about her parents' deaths and the legend of the horseman.

it started off so well, giving me vibes like <i>The Village</i>

<img src="https://www.filmfreakcentral.net/.a/6a0168ea36d6b2970c01bb07d4685b970d-pi"/>

<blockquote>Very little about Sleepy Hollow had changed since its founding. It was like the Hollow was caught inside a soap bubble, or maybe a spell—always the same, never growing or changing. There weren't even that many visitors, generally—people sometimes passed through, but they rarely stayed. Any newcomer was like grit in the Hollow's eye, and the people of the village would rub at it until the grit was removed.</blockquote>

but there's no big payoff-reveal here, no revisionist slant taking what we thought we knew about sleepy hollow and refracting its light in another direction, the way she subverted our good/evil assumptions of [book:Peter Pan|34268] in [book:Lost Boy: The True Story of Captain Hook|32828538] (and, presumably, in her other retellings, all of which i have bought and are still sitting here unread.)

this village-as-isolated-snowglobe scenario is simply establishing the scene—an outsider-wary village whose people accept magic and the supernatural as a fact of life.

<blockquote>Sleepy Hollow believed in spirits and demons, because they lived side by side with those beings. The people of the town believed in magic. And why wouldn't they? Magic was woven into the fabric of the Hollow. It drifted in the air. It rode through the night on a fast horse.</blockquote>

the headless horseman does indeed ride through these pages, but the more immediate, kid-chomping threat is...something else, so the story is less a reimagining of the source material than henry taking the original and tacking a narrative branch onto it.

there are actually two horsemen here—the one that ichabod crane encountered, whose story has become part of the village's mythos (and it confirms what washington irving insinuated about the horseman's identity in the original tale), but there’s also an enigmatic quasi-spectral horseback'ed figure who seems fixated on young ben, his intentions a combination of sinister and protective.

more than anything else, this is ben's story. ben is an orphan being raised by her grandparents. she idolizes brom, and is impatient with katrina, specifically with katrina's insistence on her dressing like a girl, keeping out of the mud and being ladylike, when ben has never felt like a girl, preferring boy's clothing and pursuits to the suffocating expectations of smalltown womanhood.

but ben's destiny lies elsewhere.

and as far as that goes, this is a very good book about yearning, and <i>becoming</i>, but the indifferent scaffolding of the horseman tale makes this pretty flimsy, storywise.

people who accept magic’s existence don't necessarily embrace it with open arms, especially when their children start dying, and ben's otherness soon becomes a liability.

<blockquote>In little villages like ours, those who don't fit in were cast out.</blockquote>

this didn't <i>have</i> to be a sleepy hollow-rework. it could have been set in any small town where "different" means "dangerous," it could just as easily have been a retelling of [book:The Crucible|17250]. in fact, one of the best parts is ben's slow-dawning realization about what, specifically, all of katrina's dismay over ben's gender nonconformity and her attempts at behavioral adjustments have been trying to prevent.

<blockquote>I recognized that grief had driven him mad. I also knew, with a deep uneasiness, that any accusations of witchcraft might be taken seriously by the people of the village.</blockquote>

as a headless horseman adaptation, this missed the mark for me, but the guts of the story are sound, and i really enjoyed the character relationships and ben's whole <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=at4DL40FQ7Y">achin' to be</a> struggle.

i'm flickering between 3 and 4 on this, but if we're judging a book by its cover, it's an easy five.

<img src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1619007071l/56552946.jpg"/>

This chilling, atmospheric continuation of the Sleepy Hollow story kept me on the edge of my seat from start to finish and gets a million bonus points for the unexpected exploration of trans identity. Horseman's super creepy folkloric horror is impossible to put down.

Christina Henry's Horseman is built on personal and familial struggles. The protagonist is a descendant of a high family in the village of Sleepy Hollow. Raised by grandparents who have direct experience with Ichabod Crane and the legend of the headless Hessian, Ben is eccentric for a young girl, often gravitating towards boys' activities and habits. As the story progresses, the question of the role of gender in Ben's identity becomes central to the narrative.

Much of the action in the story is conversational and emotional, with the majority of the transitional sections relayed through internal monologue. This leads to plot developments being telegraphed in almost stream-of-consciousness prose. Later, at the conclusion of the story, the most unexpected twist is revealed but makes so little sense it feels more like changing the rules than creating a surprising outcome. The journey of self discovery is somewhat muted, as well, with very little in the way of action or conflict to resolve Ben's gender issues.

While Henry sometimes strays far from the source material for her fairy tale novels (as she did with The Girl in Red), this one seems at times to pay only lip service to its progenitor. The story includes oblique references to the mythology of an afterlife, spectral entities and witchcraft, but with one or two exceptions, none of this is fleshed out enough to make Sleepy Hollow a convincing realm of the imagination. A lack of visual description involving all things supernatural exacerbates the problem.

For fans of Henry's series of dark fairy tales, this is still essential reading, but you can't expect a masterpiece like Near the Bone, or even a slightly crooked allegory, like The Girl in Red. There's none of the brilliance of Lost Boy or Alice in this one, but Horseman is a fresh take on the legend and a welcome visit to the old haunts of Sleepy Hollow. in the capable hands of Christina Henry

Thank you to NetGalley and Berkley Publishing group for the ARC.

Christina Henry's latest novel spine-tinglings all the way down the reader's central nervous system. Just in time for fall and Halloween, it's the perfect read for crisp days and darkening nights. I loved every horrifying page!

<b>3.0 Stars</b>
I have always praised Christina Henry as an amazing storyteller so it pains me to say that I did connect with her latest release. I absolutely loved the premise, but the actually story did not connect with my reading brain.

Unlike her other retellings, I feel that readers should read the original story in order to fully appreciate this one. I know the general story of Sleepy Hollow but never read the original classic. The novel begins with a brief overview of the narrative but it was not enough to replace understanding the nuances of the tale.

I expected the story to be modernized, so struggled that the novel felt like reading an older classic. I often struggle with the prose in classic fiction, so it's not surprising that I struggled.

While this did not work for me, I know that this narrative will work better with other readers. I would recommend this one to those that love the original horror classic and love that traditional narrative style.

Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book from the publisher.

I loved the atmosphere of this book - the author did an incredible job of expanding on Sleepy Hollow and adding too it. I’m fact, the town was my favorite character! I also enjoyed the premise of this, and how the author paid homage to the original story. However, I really could not get behind Ben. I just didn’t connect with the character at all. Another thing that felt a bit odd/choppy to me was the time jump at the end. Overall though I enjoyed this!

Readers have always wondered what happened in Sleepy Hollow after the disappearance of Ichabod Crane. This book lets us know. Very engaging continuation of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow story.

So great, I don’t even know where to start. I love Ben, the hero of the story who was born a girl but doesn’t want to be one. She doesn’t really want to be a boy either — she just wants to be like her Opa, the great Brom Bones of Sleepy Hollow lore. From early on Ben hears the horseman calling to them, and also something much worse, deep in the Sleepy Hollow woods. She will be be their witch or she will be their hero.

Loved the atmosphere — a dark and frosty fall feel through and through.

Loved the deep love the characters have for each other.

LOVE the unpredictable and empowering ending.

I enjoyed this take on the Headless Horseman. It gave possible answers to the original story questions. The ending did leave more questions at the ending and I would have loved to know more about certain characters in the book.

Ben is strong and brave, playing in the woods of Sleepy Hollow with no regard for legends and lore. When a headless boy is found in the woods, old beliefs start to resurface. New fears start to spread through the small town. Is there a horseman? What does Ben know? Henry breathes new life into Sleepy Hollow with a character that readers are sure to fall in love with.

An exciting twist on The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. It truely is Washington Irving meeting Stephen King. Character development and the plot kept me turing the pages to see what happened next. There were moments I made sure the lights were turned on. This book is not for the faint of heart and I enjoyed the twists and turns to the very last page.