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This book presents itself as a thriller, but it is really an exploration of psychological trauma, the way it distorts the main character's perceptions of the world and of herself, and her journey through and eventually out of this terrifying inner house of mirrors.

Those who are hoping for a dark, lurid thriller may end up being disappointed because, when the whole picture is finally revealed, it is somewhat anticlimactic. On the one hand, the author masterfully employs misdirection around The Incident to keep the reader engaged in unraveling the mystery. Some readers (like me) will get a thrill out of the revelation that what happened ends up being quite different from what they have been led to believe, while others will likely be annoyed that it's not nearly as "juicy" as the buildup (and the deliciously enticing name "Scarlet Christmas") suggested. However, this is why I find it more helpful to think of the book as a character-driven psychological drama than a plot-driven thriller.

The anti-climactic nature of ultimate reveal shows us in retrospect just how distorted the Charlotte's perceptions were. Even the darkest part of the present-day timeline - her abandoned plot to murder Steph - becomes in retrospect a very clear consequence of a breakdown that she never really would have been capable of going through with (as Cate later explicitly points out), rather than a sincere cold-blooded intention. We are led to believe that Charlotte may actually be capable of such a thing only because she has convinced herself that she is through the distorted prism of her trauma. Later, we find out right along with her that she isn't and never was.

While some readers may be disappointed by the underwhelming revelations, I found them fascinating in the way that they reframe whole parts of the story. For example, while "Scarlet Christmas" was undoubtedly an ugly episode, it's not nearly as grotesque as we were led to believe, and we realize once the identity of the perpetrator is revealed that it probably never would have made headlines the way it did if she wasn't a rich senator's ethereally beautiful daughter (who I couldn't help picturing looking like Anya Taylor-Joy; what tabloid wouldn't lose its mind over a killer who looks like this?). Scarlet Christmas didn't generate a media circus because of the "what" so much as the "who." Likewise, the reveal that Cate is alive and still friendly with the rest of the group may be irritating to those who were hoping to read about her grisly demise, but it casts a very different light on Charlotte's inability to even think about her, revealing the depth of Charlotte's lasting psychic damage compared to the other survivors of the incident, and how much she has isolated herself.

The ending is a bit weak. It's meant to show that Charlotte's mistaken belief in her own complicity was the thing keeping the psychic wound open, and that now that she knows the truth, she is finally beginning to heal and move on. It didn't strike me as unrealistic - we see that she still has struggles and everything is certainly not hunky-dory. However, it does feel somehow limp in a way that I'm not sure how could have been avoided in a story whose big reveal is that things were actually not as terrible as they seemed, and whose answer to the big question of whether our protagonist is actually the real villain is a resounding "no."