WARNING: THIS STORY IS DARK AND DISTURBING. READER DISCRETION IS ADVISED.
The other orphans say Margot is lucky. Lucky to survive the horrible accident that killed her family. Lucky to have her own room because she wakes up screaming every night.
And finally, lucky to be chosen by a prestigious family to live at their remote country estate.
But it wasn’t luck that made the Suttons rescue Margot from her bleak existence at the group home. Margot was hand-picked to be a companion to their silent, mysterious daughter, Agatha. At first, helping with Agatha – and getting to know her handsome older brother, Barrett – seems much better than the group home. But soon, the isolated, gothic house begins playing tricks on Margot’s mind, making her question everything she believes about the Suttons and herself.
Margot’s bad dreams may have stopped when she came to live with Agatha – but the real nightmare has just begun.
When I first read the summary, I thought the story might be taking place sometime in the 1900s. But turns out I was wrong. The story may take place in the present day, but the Suttons’ historic gothic house, outdated way of thinking, and lack of Wi-Fi make it feel like a different era.
Even though this book is 439 pages long and has a lot of unnecessary run-on sentences, I stuck with it because of my need to know how it ends. So many questions, and I needed answers. What happened to Agatha that turned her into this hollow version of herself? Why is there a secret graveyard on the property? What’s the deal with the spoon on the front cover, and are those nails or sewing needles? I’m still not positive about that last one.
It’s obvious that something sinister is going on in this house. The question is what exactly. Is it some secret from the past, something immoral, or something supernatural? It turns out that two out of three of those things were true. As more of the family’s history comes to light, you may or may not guess what is going on. But it’s not until the whole truth comes out that you realize just how severely messed up it all is. I was like, “WOW, that is messed up!”
The story moves a tad slow, but I think it was done this way to build suspense and because it takes Margot a long time to fully realize something sinister is going on. She knew from the beginning that the house and the family were weird, but she doesn’t catch on to the severity of the situation until it was too late. She might have caught on sooner if she hadn’t been distracted by her romance with Barrett and her desperate need for human contact after losing her family.
At the beginning of the book, Margot had a conversation with a girl named Tam at the group home that stuck with me. Tam was brash, told Margaret to “get over it,” and that she was the luckiest person she knew. Lucky isn’t the right word to describe Margot. Traumatized is more appropriate.
When Margot says that her life sucks, Tam responds with, “I never said your life didn’t suck. Only that you’re lucky. Those are totally different things.”
When asked, “If things are so terrible, what’s the point?”, Tam responds with what I think is a pretty insightful look at life.
“You’re alive so you might as well go along with it. There’s no big secret. You live and then you die. And that’s it.”
Basically, even though life sucks sometimes and terrible things happen, we are all just lucky to be alive, so you might as well go along with it.