Following Opal's story and the story of Starling House, it was easy to get lost in it. Harrow's style of writing is easy to digest, but packed full of beautiful descriptions and easily flowing sentences. I found that, after a point, the words and the emotion were synonomous, it felt like reading a movie that I could see in my head and feel in my chest.
Throughout the book, we're introduced to a wide variety of characters, each with their own lives and motivations in Eden. The only people that ever felt out of place were out of place, and it was fascinating to see just how perfectly entertwined the whole community was, and how Harrow so effectively presented it, to the point that the reader could just tell. 

The story itself is packed full of tidbits, interesting information, everything you need to uncover a story. It has clues to the mysteries that Opal is trying to work out, that as a reader, I was able to pick up on some stuff before it was revealed to us, and that felt good. It was nice to have a book really play into that. The first tidbit I noticed and the thing I loved most about the book itself were the footnotes. It was such an interesting concept - reading through Opal's story and watching as someone else commented on it, giving us the facts. It gave the first half of the book this sort of "found footage" type feeling. It introduced the concept of unsettling, of questioning the reality of the story and the fear that the reader feels, because the footnotes picked apart what Opal told us, then she put it back together. The footnotes gave us the facts, but the commenter wasn't there when this happened. Opal gives us the truth, but she doesn't know the facts. 
Unfortunately, after the first 75 or so pages, the footnotes slowed down massively. This is sort of when the story in the present picked up, so there weren't as many facts to comment on, but I missed those little tidbits. 

Starling House had the potential to be massively more unsettling and creepy than it actually was. I loved the story, loved the people and the book, and loved the way it made me feel.  This book felt like going home, it felt like seeing that place you went to as a child that you nearly forgot as you aged, it felt like confronting yourself and being okay with what you find. It felt comfortable, and cozy, and I loved it. And while I would have loved for it to be more of a mystery, to play into that creepy feeling that I got in the first 20 pages, that doesn't change the fact that I tore through this book in a day and half, annotated it and have read and re-read parts of it time and time again. It was gorgeous, and I loved it.