I've honestly been hyped to read this since I first heard of this in mid-2020. I bought it almost immediately, and whenever I saw it laying unread on my shelf, I got excited for it all over again. I think I may have let the hype build up a little too much.

Overall, I enjoyed this book, and enjoyed the time I spent listening to the audio. I'm not sure if in the end an audiobook was the best choice for this book purely because of how much focus you need to have to follow everything that's going on at points, but I honestly loved how the narrator's tone and presentation added to the story, and I think it lended more emotion to the voices of the characters that I might not have gotten otherwise. In the end, I don't regret my choice to listen, and whatever I may have missed due to small distractions, was made up for with the performance of the narrator. She did a fantastic job of showing the depth of emotion the main characters went through, and her narration made tense scenes keep me on the edge of my seat.

I think the main reason that this book is 4 stars instead of 5 is that I was a little let down by the overall ending. This book has so much build up, and I absolutely loved the moments where Gyre can't trust what's going on around her, and how this fact builds up slowly over time. This book had everything I expected in terms of psychological thriller, and the inability to trust Em yet the fact that Gyre has to only adds to it. However, with so much build up, I was expecting a bigger twist, instead of a few smaller ones. This let down mainly started when

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Gyre gets to the bodies at the end of the cave, and while the scenes themselves are harrowing, it didn't feel like there was this big realization alongside it. The same was true of the spores, which felt like a gradual realization over time since we couldn't trust that Em was telling the truth when she said it was safe.

In the end, it wasn't the twists that had me gasping, but the little hints that Gyre would find here and there that things weren't as they seemed. It made the twists feel disappointing because they didn't come off as good as the build up did.

However, this book wholly terrified me, to the extent I felt creeped out going downstairs at night to get the mail. This level of fear was kept high throughout the whole book, right up until the end. The build up of the book, and Gyre's inability to trust anything anymore by the end of it, made even

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the miraculous rescue at the end seem unsure until Gyre was actually out, since we had no way of knowing whether Em was telling the truth or not.

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In the end, I did overall really enjoy this, and I may reread this physically to see how the experience compares. I can't wait to read more of this author's work!