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This book was fine! Not as good as I was expecting based on friends' hype + my love of Piranesi, but maybe I'm just not the target audience for it, since I couldn't care less about British historical fiction. I was hoping for more magic system development, I guess. All the characters were so tedious, which I realize was on purpose and we're supposed to be laughing at them, but the book gave them soooo many pages to go on at length that I found myself just rolling my eyes most of the time. The story did manage to pull me in by the last quarter or so, though.

All of my goodreads friends said this book was amazing, and they were right. What a delight. I'm on a bit of a binge with fiction about mysterious, infinite, paranormal architectural spaces (House of Leaves and Subcutanean were the last two books I read) and this was a really nice palate cleanser for not treating that idea as inherently horrifying.

I wasn't expecting the ending to be as happy or resolved as it was, but I find myself glad that it was.

I'm biased because the author is a friend of mine, but I adored this book. A good combination of campy Goosebumps-style teen horror and some seriously existentially terrifying moments. Fabulous use of generative narrative to evoke themes of multiplicity and subtle variation. And the relationship between the two main characters is so interesting, complex, and well-explored. At least in my copy, the resolution of both kinds of tension (interpersonal and paranormal) felt somehow both surprising and satisfying.

This book was a slog, and there's a lot to roll one's eyes at, but I'm glad I read it given its influence on other works I enjoy and its relationship to interactive narrative.