So many reviews have called Pittard's writing haunting, and made connections to Jeffrey Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides, but there is more to it than that. I constantly had the feeling of watching the plot unfold through the clicking and clattering of old film home movies. The recollections have that dreamy, dark around the edges quality. Each conversation among the boys so clearly as that basement feeling, the way you get when you're huddled beneath your parent (or some parent's) house. I love the attention to myth building, to the way that information gets passed along in small towns. I want so desperately for their version of the tale to be right.

I read this mostly in low, warm lighting, under blankets and pashminas. There is a need to burrow while listening to this story, to give yourself up to the warmth and quasi-slumber state as you lose yourself in the collective we.