My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

There were some things you couldn’t escape. One of them was yourself.

You get up every day and decide what kind of person you want to be. Responsibilities don’t just go away because you’ve ignored them in the past.

Memories were more than just images of the past: they shaped the way we moved through life. What we saw, felt, thought, existed differently because of the things we had experienced.

‘Mabel.’ His voice tickled against my skin, and beneath it. I’d never thought my name would feel so meaningful to me. As if it truly did belong to me alone, and said so much more than I had ever realised. Those two syllables contained everything he saw in me, which in turn was everything I was. It sounded like the most beautiful compliment I’d ever heard, yet at the same time the most despairing cry.

I had always known it was dangerous, opening yourself up to other people. Once they get comfortable in there, sooner or later they get tangled up with you. They start popping into your head as you move through the world.

My Review:

This prodigious tome contained an exceptionally creative, immersive, and well-plotted tale that was laced together with equal measures of intriguing and emotive details that fully-fleshed out and conjured these uniquely alluring characters and scenarios into a smooth scroll through my gray matter. The writing style was engaging, well-honed, maddeningly paced, fraught with tension, surprisingly poignant, and kept me reading late into the night, far longer than originally planned, while poking, plucking, and prodding at my curiosity until the very last page.

While not my typical genre, I tumbled headfirst into an all-consuming, enticing, and itchy vortex, often finding myself ruminating on the story when I was regretfully busy elsewhere and had to put my Kindle down. I wanted to hiss at any interruption to my perusal and rebelliously stopped checking my notifications or answering the phone. Each of the 430 pages was swirling with atmosphere, and I would have avidly read 430 more.