This book grabbed me by the jugular and did not let me go. The setting of Dalloway Boarding School was stunning; Lee painted a picture of a school that I could see, feel, sear, and smell. Not many authors can do that for me, and one of the reasons why it was easy for me, I think, is because I grew up in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains, and she visited the location or studied the artwork of the Hudson River School or pictures on the internet and captured what she saw. Even though the map initially told me it was like a college campus, I could not stop thinking of the Mohonk Mountain House in Upstate New York: the cliffs, the house, the interior, the landscape, and EVERYTHING. I am not ready to give up October or the spooky season, and this book worked perfectly.

The story: Okay, so it was confusing at times with the true story of Alex's death, but either way it happened, it indeed left Felicity traumatized and making the courageous decision to go back to the same school where her girlfriend died tragically and even lived in the same boarding building. The tragic history of the Dalloway Five was entrancing, and when Felicity was throwing herself into the study of it might look obsessive on the outside, but I can see how someone can be so entranced by it. The rich history of witches paired with the individual girls being vintage and very old-fashioned, all living in a house that is hundreds of years old, made this book feel trapped in time in the best way possible. The bit where Ellis's sibling visited and talked about the trauma she experienced when she was young brought out a very different version of Ellis, and that was where the story started to get more complicated for me. The epilogue of the book I wished I hadn't read. Bear with me; I had this idea that Felicity would be one of the great literary geniuses that she had loved to read so much, and I wanted her to take the story of what had happened to her and make it her own. But the fortune we got ended up behaving in the way a sociopath does, the disinterest in her girlfriend and the frivolous way she spoke about Alex and Ellis before they died led me to believe she wasn't sorry for what she did and that killing Ellis made her into that person.