The Press Association have reviewed Sentinel! Check out what they thought below…

Just weeks before he turns 16, Nicholas Hallow is orphaned when his parents die in a bizarre train crash. They’d left him at home in Cambridge in the care of bubbly neighbour Tabatha, but hadn’t told him where they were going. In their absence, Nicholas finds a hidden room containing vast tomes of Sentinel Chronicles and a birthday gift from his parents. Sam, an elderly friend of the Hallows, is tasked with telling Nicholas what has happened to his folks and takes him through unseasonal snow to the remote country mansion home of his ‘godmother’.

On the way, Nicholas has a strange premonition moments before their decrepit bus is stormed by a beautiful, scarlet-clad woman intent on murder. Nicholas begs Sam to explain his parents’ secret life, but it falls to his strangely youthful godmother Jessica, to reveal that he himself is a Sentinel, a “supernatural demon hunter”.

Written poetically (“An angry black cloud was unfurling across the afternoon sun like a colossal inkblot”), with carefully-drawn characters, this is an extremely promising YA debut by a young author.

8/10

(Review by Kate Whiting)