I feel like this could've been more cohesive if it had scrapped ever showing anything from the other castle. If much of Antonela's history was left up in the air, if her trauma was hinted at and her location a question mark, rather than just... splatted onto the page. In doing so it mixed genres, hard, and for me that didn't work at all. You want a gothic horror, you have to stay in the land of gothic horror and instead it got super off track with everything to do with Antonela, the way it described her memories completely lost the entire vibe the book had been cultivating.

It could've kept that storyline and just showed it in cracks in Antonela's personality, triggers in her reactions, etc., etc., and she could've gotten an effective and devastating final speech when it would've been most poignant, but instead we got shown her.... entire backstory. It was already struggling with (and not quite pulling off) all that it had going on - Teo, Felipe, Sebastián, Bea - but that was when it really proved it couldn't handle all the balls it had in the air.