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Mar 19, 2018unabridgedchick rated this title 0.5 out of 5 stars
Owen sets up her book deliciously -- a decaying country estate, two imaginative siblings, the push-pull of Victorian expectations for men and women -- and then, bam!, around 80 pages in, the wonderful sort of gothic-y family novel becomes something else entirely, and not, in my opinion, for the better. Those tenderhearted siblings who hooked me at the start of the novel became flat and predictable, lost the the mass of other stock characters: lady vamp hunter, a doctor in league with the undead, the drunk priest mired in the world of the occult. The pacing is incredibly uneven, and leaves the sense that Owen tried to stitch together some short stories into a novel. The result isn't successful.