3 out of 5 stars

Thank you to Simon and Schuster for the opportunity to read and review this book as an advanced readers copy.

Overall, this was a very strong and creepy story that follows 2 different narrators in 2 different times, but does all tie nicely together in the end. I really liked the haunted house aspect of this one and the back story provided through the characters experiences. There was some serious creepiness here that will appeal to a wide range of readers.

Why only a 3 star rating?

While I did enjoy the dual POV structure of the story, it was difficult to connect with the two main characters/ narrators. This was not an age issue, even though I am not the target demographic for a YA novel. It was mainly due to the fact that both of them ( and many of the supporting cast), were just horrible people. There is backstory to explain why they are so negative/ mean/ nasty but it was hard to get behind and root for them as they were genuinely unlikeable.

The other thing that consistently pulled me out of the story was the constant reference, in describing characters, as either black or white. The use of capitalization in Black while leaving white in lower case made this even more obvious. This may not be a popular opinion, but it did impact my experience enough to be very annoying.

Finally, there was a very memorable, and rather unbelievable assertion that 1) there are no guns in Toronto and 2) that a city girl from Toronto would not know what a snow mobile is. As a Canadian myself, this just seemed odd considering that both timelines in the book are modern and the characters all seem to have access to cell phones and internet connections.

Overall, I did enjoy the spooky aspects of the story and I felt the ending was satisfying and tied up loose ends very nicely.