An otherwise excellent premise, with excellent characters and a good Coraline-esque haunted house with a dash of Gothic horror.

And it would have been perfect if not for the grating writing style. This book tries too hard to be poetic and purple-prosey and it does not work to its advantage. The repetitions attempt to make the language seem floral and vivid, but it just makes me cringe and skip through it. Seriously, the text doesn't even let the reader come to their own conclusions, sometimes. And an otherwise excellent book suffers from the pitfalls of Schwab's writing.