I had been having a rough time of things, so I just needed to read something. Anything that was available. none of my holds had come in and I was not able to get into anything that was in my digital purchases TBR, so to the library and picking something at random!
Normally I would talk a little about what the book was about, and there was a story to this book, but I cannot do that. I am aware that there is a character named Jane, that a girl named Lily went missing, and that there is an asylum with a bunch of people in it, but I cannot tell you much more than that. I cannot remember this book at all, and I just finished it last night.
Some of it is likely due to the aforementioned inability to get into anything,1 but also some of it is the framing device that made it hard to get attached to anything happening. The story is told through the perspective of a bunch of ghosts that are watching Jane as she goes about her life, which made her story feel like it was so distant from what I was supposed to be paying attention to. Even though Jane was the throughline, I never felt like I was supposed to be paying attention to her so much as the characters in the foreground, and those characters did not stay on topic.
I think this was ultimately just not for me. I’ve never had a book vanish from my mind so quickly after reading it and, though the prose did have a nice quality to it, I think it was just not a good match for what I was looking for.
- And health issues flaring up again, yay brain problems [↩]