I breaks my heart to say… that this was a book that I had to read. I don’t mean as in “OMG THIS SOUNDS SO GOOD HAVE TO READ” kind of “had to read” I mean it as it says, I had to read it annoyingly to write a paper on. And as a person who is against reading books for analysis, this obviously left me feeling angry and made me try to procrastinate on reading a book for study. (Basically I really REALLY didn’t want to read this just because of that reason. Isn’t a book’s main purpose for leisure? If that statement is true then why bother studying… analysing things in a book. You’re purely taking the joy away from the essence… the magic of the book!) Look, I’m not here to complain about my woeful dread of writing analysis on a book I was told to read, I am here to review. That’s what you are here for too and honestly I should just get to the point.

The point is that I actually enjoyed the book.

Once I opened myself up to the book, tried to read it and ENJOY IT rather than have a negative mindset of “Ugh… analysis bleugh!” I found that the story wasn’t as bad as I assumed before I even started. Basically it was about this girl named Esme, a sixteen year old living in the 1930’s… years later her niece discovers she has an aunt she never even heard of that is being released from a psychiatric ward… the only one able to answer her questions is Iris’s grandmother Kitty but she seems unable to answer. Why was Esme in an institution for such a long time? What did she do that made her become erased from her family history?

Let me be honest here, I disliked the start… the first 100 pages at least… and then it got interesting and I sort of… okay I did end up finishing and binge reading.

I can’t say much apart from that there are so many things that can be easily spoiled.

But what I can say is you’re going to be confused… that’s done on purpose. The author she herself has made it like so. That’s her intention but it ends up joining into a sound conclusion… I wish the book was longer to make it perfectly sound but it did reach a resolution nevertheless.

I wish it was longer or had a sequel. Other than that I enjoyed it. I had fun.

ACTUAL RATING: 3.7 STARS