invicticide's reviews
43 reviews

This is a book about love:

and loss:

Everything outside of Miri and Leah's relationship is vague, and there are lots of questions with very few concrete answers, because this isn't a story about solving the problem; it's a story about accepting what's happened. It's a slow and quiet meditation on grief, heavy on beautiful sentences and melancholic vibes, and light on action and plot.

The middle sags, and a couple things happen around 2/3 of the way in that miscued me into thinking we were going in a very different direction than we did. YMMV.

If you're currently dealing with grief or loss of your own, this book might hurt a lot to read. It might also help, a little, in the end. 

This is not a haunted house story in the way I expected. A few weird things happen, but the focus is not really on paranormal events at all; it's on the unraveling psychology of the main character, Eleanor, through whose eyes we experience a stay in a supposedly haunted house where haunting is teased and hinted at relentlessly, but very little haunting actually happens.

This does have one of the best opening paragraphs I've ever read. And the ending is abrupt, and sharp, and "kind of" works if you squint at it just so, but it feels like a short story ending, and this requires much more investment than a short story, so it left me feeling a little unsatisfied.