Boy did I come into this book with high hopes. It's got everything I usually love: werewolves, monster families, morally gray characters, a genuinely eerie atmosphere at times. But, unfortunately, a good chunk of the book felt hollow. While some of the characters are interesting and receive a passable bit of characterization, some are left as thin cutouts, Luma and Rhys in particular. It's not until the end that we see more characters somewhat fleshed out other than Eleanor, so it leaves a healthy middle of the book where it just seems like we're just waiting for the next interesting thing to happen. Then, by the end, we're bombarded with so much information. There's one particular chapter where there's two big character introspections/reveals back to back and it was so difficult to absorb it all at once.

And Eleanor, I don't think I've come across a more oblivious character. There's stretching out the mystery of your book for narrative or atmospheric reasons, and then there's making the character not question anything around her just to pad out the page length. I think if Eleanor took the time to actually see what's happening around her and what she's capable of, this book probably would've been much shorter, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Now I didn't entirely despise the character. I empathized with her trauma and feeling out of place within her own family. I even recognize how those things could contribute to her being in denial about the things going on in her house. It just gets very frustrating when you figure out the obvious answer to a mystery that the character doesn't get around to realizing for another 5 chapters.

To be a little bit more positive about the book, I did like how certain things are left ambiguous, whether that's character histories or what kind of monsters they actually are. It reminded me a bit of how Neil Gaiman develops his more monstrous, ethereal characters, though Szabo's monsters come off as way less cryptic. They just sort of resonate on a similar vibe.

While I think I went into this book with maybe too many expectations, it was worth at least the one read.