Slow and excellently paced, very creepy. I love this!

This is about teenage girl dealing with guilt, grief, and loss. She's struggling with how her ways of dealing with her grief keep not fitting in with her friends and classmates who are grieving the same person, but not all quite the same loss. 

I kept thinking it was going to, at some point, explain how they were able to talk on the phone. The question was raised repeatedly, but Sam doesn't know and Julie never learns how or why it worked. I wish it hadn't felt like maybe the answer would appear, and I hope that anyone planning to read it can have a better experience from knowing not to wait for that reveal which never comes. Setting aside my longing for a literal answer, the way the connection manifested felt like it paralleled (and perhaps reinforced) the shape of Julie’s grief. That resonance was important and worked well in the story. It's very focused on her and her focus on Sam for much of the book, gradually showing more of her other connections and relationships as she's able to start thinking about people other than him and about things other than her loss. The change comes slowly enough to feel real and makes for a thoughtfully done and very poignant portrayal of grief.

PIRANESI is melancholic and contemplative, a meditation on an existence which is as familiar to the narrator as it will likely be bewildering to the reader. 

The prose is immersive in both style and content, gradually explaining what’s literally happening even as the narrator often misses the significance of what he’s relaying, or places a different importance on it. The setting is known to the narrator, his sense of the world is that he knows his place within it and the shape of its peculiarities, though there’s always more to explore. Since the reader necessarily is outside of that understanding at first, it provides for slow revelations and discoveries as the contents of his explanations begin to, gradually, make sense. Towards the midpoint it becomes that I could guess at things he didn’t yet understand, providing some of the great feeling of guessing the solution to a mystery early. The ending, however, plays out in a way I didn’t predict but which feels suitable.

I feel so peaceful, after reading it. There’s a kind of happiness from listening to someone talk at length about a thing they love, and Piranesi loves The House. It’s not all great for him, especially when plot things ensue, but vast stretches of the book are filled with the love and care of someone who pays intimate attention to something which fascinates them.