What a quirky book with all the makings of a cult classic. It actually reminded me a lot of We Ride Upon Sticks--which I also unexplainably loved--offbeat storytelling and narrative humor, girls in powerful friendships, New England... anyways, despite taking nearly 6 months to get through this book I loved it. I loved Harper Harper and Audrey and, well, Merrit grew on me. I didn't care as much for the 1902 story-within-a-story and didn't get attached to those characters, but I did appreciate the great lengths the author went to include such lore and foreboding into the story.

Speaking of, I was struck with how much of the story weaves in real things. Pop culture references, even references to what was pop culture over a century ago, and the recurring keystone of Mary Maclane's diary are all real things. I had also heard a version of the Spite Manor story before...It left me kind of unsettled and wondering what in the story is real and what isn't. This is such a meta element of the book, as the characters themselves are constantly wondering what is their imagination, what is a hallucination, what is manipulated and what is authentic. If you know me, you know I hate dream sequences and unreliable narrators, and this book toes the line into *very* dangerous territory from an Alisa-hates-this-story perspective. But the dizzy confusion always came back to a magical reality that I not only believed, but that sold me the whole Brookhants curse.

In sum: not a book for everyone, but a certain kind of reader will really enjoy it.