Katya Apekina

What an excellent novel! It is shortish, 350 pages with lots of white space as the storyline switches from person to person every 3 pages or so- it only takes a couple of days to read. The style works very effectively and you experience two full stories and many lesser ones, and yes, some are creepy. The voice of the main character, Edie, is a little familiar in feel and tone to some other literary characters, but what a great feisty voice it is, so I enjoyed her segments in particular. A great read I’d highly recommend. 4.5 stars.… (mehr)

Ruthlessly gothic, but with just a dash of Jodi-Picoult-like familial feeling so that the story became somehow all the more troubling than if it had been purely gothic.

The novel reminded me of last year's magnificently terrifying horror film "Hereditary," which like this novel also features an artist-parent who tortures her children, plus a smidge of self-immolation.

But because this novel comes to me outside of a tidy genre framework, and because it instead just barely nudges into a "maybe this could happen in the real world" space, I found the story unusually disturbing, and a little confusing to read. It's in something of an 'uncanny valley' for me that way. If the novel were pure genre then its excesses would be more enjoyable. But the novel instead asks me to feel real feelings, for situations that aren't realistic, and I guess I resented that a bit.… (mehr)