I actually really struggled to rate this book and decide how I felt about it overall. Much of the writing is beautiful, especially the descriptive elements which are almost poetic. The story itself is moving and shocking in all the best ways. However, I often felt that some descriptive sections were much longer than they needed to be and the poetic/ descriptive sections weren’t well balanced by the action in the story. Bigger, more violent or climactic actions were described fleetingly while descriptions of how a person pictured or imagined a certain food or animal or interaction might take up four times that. This isn’t to say the book was bad- it was great- but the imbalance really stuck out to me. The characters were fascinating and I wanted to know more about all of them and found myself wishing certain characters had a POV. While I’m not always a fan of ghost stories, the ghostly elements in this story were good- though not as moving as Morrison’s “Beloved”, they were still effective and beautifully written. Overall would recommend to people looking for ghost stories that are unique if they enjoy stories that go a little purple and can tolerate reading about violence.