This book wrecked me. It took me an age to finally be able to write this review because holy cow. What a book. Ling Ling is an incredible writer. Her descriptions are so vivid and gorgeous and horrifying. The whole book, I felt like I was just on a blade's edge between immediately understanding what was happening and having no idea what was happening at all.

The story is such a visceral and damning look at the pain of losing out on your culture and struggling with your identity. How racism and western beauty standards can attack you from a young age and groom you into accepting that you will never be enough.

This book is brutal. And, as a warning, there are some absolutely horrifying violations of women near the end of this book. I very much encourage looking up trigger warnings before reading. I'm not one to get wigged out, but these scenes genuinely left me rattled.

Overall, this book was an incredible read. My only real critique is that the ending felt very rushed and confused. It left me feeling very unsatisfied because it felt almost like the author ran out of time and needed to end it quickly.

Otherwise, I definitely recommend this to people who are okay with gore, surrealist horror, and body horror.

Edit: this book won't leave my head. So I've updated the rating accordingly.

I have mixed feelings about this book. On one hand, there's a lot of things I really enjoyed about it, but on the other hand, something about it left me finishing the book really annoyed.

Let's start with the stuff I loved: The writing in this book is beautiful. Baker's use of language and imagery is unreal. The vividness with which I was able to picture every moment in this book was incredible. She also had this incredible way of making intangible things feel tangible.

Lee and Sen were also so well written. They were fully fleshed out, complete people with painfully sympathetic flaws and, also, really annoying one's, too. It's been a long time since I read a book where the characters felt this real to me.

The way Baker played with perception in every way in this book was so interesting and reminded me of one of my professors in college who loved to talk about the importance of perspective in narration. The way Sen perceived Lee vs the way Lee perceived himself vs the way he thought others perceived him. Genuinely great writing.

Now to the stuff I'm iffy on: While Baker was wonderful at imagery, she wasn't so great at symbolism. There was a ton of repeated symbolism in this book. I won't list it for spoiler reasons, but at first, I was excited by the prospect of this book being so full of symbolism to analyze as I read, but somewhere around the halfway mark, I just got tired. It was the same thing over, and over, and over, throughout the whole book and it was used heavily. And, at a certain point, it no longer became symbolism to make you think and wonder, because Baker would just blatantly tell you exactly what the symbolism meant. Like, she didn't trust her audience to figure it out or pick up on it.

The mystery is certainly mysterious, but at that halfway mark, I started to feel like I was watching LOST again. (I can talk for at least 4 hours about all the reasons why I hate LOST) I felt like I was being drowned in questions and not even receiving a crumb of an answer to keep me going. While, at the end, there was this moment of awe as all the pieces came together, it was rather short lived as I realized that the only parts I hadn't really put together yet, were things the reader had absolutely no way of putting together. Or, at least, it felt like that to me.

Also, this is just a me thing, but good lord the amount of gore felt way over the top. It got to the point where I was almost completely desensitized to it, because it felt like it was every other page.

I think another point of disappointment for me was that I came into the book expecting, essentially, a haunted house, but that's not what this story is. Not really. And I think that kind of killed the story for me. That may be my own fault, though, for misunderstanding.

Ultimately, I don't think this was a bad book. I had fun dissecting everything and I really am in awe of Bakers talent with imagery. But I wouldn't list this in my top books of the year.

“I’m not a lost lamb. I’m a black sheep.” Give me a break.

I like books with messy characters. I like books with grey characters. I like books with a sense of humor even in bleak moments. I like books with lots of family drama. I really like horror books where the humans turn out to be the real monsters. By all rights, I should’ve loved this book.

Instead, what this book gave me was boring prose, extremely cringe humor (she literally describes an old meme at one point), cartoonishly awful family members, one of the most annoying main characters I’ve encountered, and a story that completely lacked in any heart, soul, meaning, or message besides “murder is okay as long as the person you murdered is kind of an asshole”.

I just kept waiting for the shoe to drop that would prove that my initial feelings were wrong, and that the author was playing the long game on us. That the wildly inconsistent characters, whiplash-like emotions, and seemingly narcissistic main character were just a side effect of the haunting. Something to indicate that the author was aware that her characters were all acting like soulless goons. But I got nothing.

We just spend the entire book with a cast of indescribably dumb, unapologetically amoral, and infuriatingly miserable people. (Yes, Anna, too.) The only exception being the two small children. I am intimately aware of what it’s like to be the scapegoat of a family. I am also intimately familiar with narcissistic people. Almost the whole book, I felt like I was rotting in the mind of the unreliable narration of a narcissist and being told that I should sympathize and root for them.

Okay. With that out of the way, here is some more technical critiques.

Based on the cover and the synopsis, I really thought I was going to get a very atmospheric, gothic, haunting story with some lovely prose (or at least interesting prose). I’ve always wanted to go to Italy, so I was hoping this story would take me there and also give me a good spook.

However, it did neither. The prose is extremely bland. It’s not bad, just not what I was expecting. This is the kind of prose style I expect to find in YA romances (not derogatory), not gothic horror. The plot was also lacking, and messy, and didn’t seem to have an actual point. I appreciated that the haunting started immediately, but that also kind of put the author in an unfortunate corner, because she then had to make her characters unbearably obtuse, in order to keep them in the villa.

The plot also couldn’t seem to decide if it wanted to be about the haunting or the family. I’ve read plenty of books and watched plenty of movies where the family drama and the haunting coexist and play off each other in interesting and fun ways. This book didn’t do that.

The most confusing part was once you get to the chapter titled “finale”, there was still 40% of the book left. The next, nearly half of the book, feels like a completely different, much more boring, story. And it drags. I had to bump up the speed of my audiobook (which I rarely ever do because of my struggle with audio processing) because I needed to be done with it and it felt like it would never end.

And when it did end, it ended in the corniest way possible. I could tell that the author wanted you to cheer and oo and ahh, but I felt like I was watching a terrible B movie. The kind that’s not even good enough to be funny.

Ultimately, I just don’t understand this book. I don’t understand the point and I don’t understand what the author wanted the reader to get out of it.

It’s just a bad book.

I would not recommend this to anyone. In fact, I think I would go out of my way to warn people off of it. That’s how bad of a time I had reading it.

But if you really want to read this book, I do recommend the audiobook. The narrator was incredible and the only reason I made it through. She hit all the right beats. All the right emotions, and her voices weren’t irritating. 10/10 for her. 0/10 for the book.