I read this as a buddy read, which is always a fun way to approach a book, and this allowed me to be confused with someone else, instead of just on my own. Yay! While I liked the story, the time travel component was confusing in a way that might have just been me, but might have also been that it wasn’t well-explained. So basically, I don’t know if the problem was the book or me.
We start in present day, where June Farrow has just buried the grandmother who raised her. All of the Farrow women suffer from a “curse” in which they go mad, and June started having hallucinations about a year before the start of the novel. She gets some mysterious clues after her grandmother passes that leads her to walk through a door and discover that maybe it’s more than just a genetic predisposition to madness that generations of her family have been experiencing.
I enjoyed the book and figuring out parts of the mystery as June figured them out. There was a revelation that I think might have been meant to be a surprise but wasn’t, but there were other elements that I wouldn’t have realized on my own. It was an entertaining story but a bit lacking in some ways. Because so much of the focus was on discovering more about the mysteries of the Farrow women, and a small town mystery involving the local minister, some of the characters weren’t as fleshed out as they could have been, and I missed that balance. Also, as I indicated above, some of the time travel just didn’t make sense to me in terms of who did what when and how June knew certain things at the end of the novel. That’s actually what shaved a hair off of my rating, so I’m giving it 3.75 stars rounded up.
That said, I’m still glad I read the book. If you can let go of some of the questions about how everything happened and just settle in for the ride, it’s a good story, and I’d like to read more of Adrienne Young’s books in the future.