I wanted to love this book, and the writing itself is beautiful, but it was a bit slow I’m afraid. Running a dual story is always a risk in this way, and I often find books that flip back and forth in time a little slower, but neither story really got going, and whilst I enjoyed the ending in terms of how each person’s story was concluded, I wanted more of that part of the story, more of a build up to that, and less meandering. For example, we know from the very start that modern day teen Maeve has just come out the other side of a long term illness, but we didn’t really need a whole chapter of her visiting the hospital for a check up, when a summarising sentence or two that told how she felt about it would have done the same job. What I would have preferred is to have more of the 1973 story - more development of those characters, which would in turn have given us more understanding of the modern day relationship dynamics. We see a group of girls doing the same thing over and over in the same place, but never get a sense of who they are and what it was like to live in that time and with those ideals. Considering how great this author is, and how well researched Animals of Lockwood Manor was, this could have been an amazing dip into a time of political and social change, and how a group of teenage girls react to it.