While I thought that the

mushrooms being the explanation for what was happening

was very cool, there were huge sections of this book that I really did not enjoy reading. Maybe this just isn’t the genre for me, but the villains were so hateful and repulsive that reading about them made me dislike the book as a whole. I haven’t read a lot of gothic fantasy so I’ll try another at some point to see if it’s just the genre or the book itself that I didn’t like.