I really liked the atmosphere and the creepiness of the final third of the book, and I wish the rest of the book was more like that.

Instead, the first two thirds of it is honestly pretty uninspired as we mostly just follow two of the three main characters looking for their missing sister and being followed by a weird guy with a cow skull on his head. It feels like the author had a cool idea for a premise and then sort of didn't know how exactly to make a whole 300-page story out of it. Why was the whole book about these two girls looking around modern-day England for their sister. Even when one or two weird things happened, they just weren't interesting enough. Why are authors so uninspired? I can't seem to find a single book that has more than one interesting and engaging idea. It's almost always like a super good filling surrounded by a mountain of kind of bland dough, and I don't know how much more bread I can eat through to get to a little dollop of the good stuff. I wish I could ask the author whether or not she genuinely thought that characters looking around town for someone was interesting. How can it be interesting to anyone, especially in a novel that has fantasy/speculative elements as well? It's like writing a cool world and lore and monsters into a story, and then focus on the characters (mostly) normal lives 90% of the time with barely any of the fantastical elements, or at least ones that weren't just repeating the same event over and over:

white flowers blooming out of wounds and rotting corpses

. Seriously, couldn't you have thought of something else to happen for a change?

Not gonna lie, though, I did not expect that

the skull guy was actually the father

, and it was foreshadowed really well to the point that some other people even saw it coming. I don't know why I didn't, but the rest of the twist, while not too cliche, wasn't that hard to figure out, and I suspected as what the twist pretty early on, which was a bit disappointing:

that the girls are actually imposters and not the real daughters that disappeared.

However, sadly, it's horribly explained, and when I mean horribly, I mean barely. IDK if the autor was too lazy to explain stuff in more detail or she thought going into the science and bilogy of things would demistify it, but I really didn't like that

we never found anything out about the girls' past identities other than the fact that they were already dead, and while it's explained how you can skin someone and put their skin on yourself to look like them on the outside, we got answers for why they ate a lot, but nothing in terms of why everyone was so obsessed with them and how they were able to seduce and control people by touching them or letting them taste them. You can't just give characters weirdly specific powers like that and never explain why they have them, especially when you had no problem explaining why they had endless appetites and such. Not cool.

Anyway, I guess I recommend the story if you like some gothic-ish atmosphere and such, but be warned that the first two thirds of the story are pretty non-magical for the most part and don't expect a whole lot of sense regarding the worldbuilding. Again, this book felt more like the author had one cool image/idea in her head, then tried to write a story around that, and sady, it didn't quite work. As a write myself, this happens to me all too often, but I know how to spot it and scrap the story unless I can make the narrative sensible and compelling and have shit happen that's not just characters going on a mild contemporary goose chase in a novel that promised supernatural stuff.