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Emily Carroll: A Guest in the House (Hardcover, 2023, Roaring Brook Press, First Second) 2 stars

Fantastic. Atmospheric and unpredictable, beautifully blending the mundane and the phantasmagorical. Carroll's artwork is exquisite, overtly on the pages where fantasy takes over, and more subtly in the dollops of colour that leak into the real world, especially when thinking of those in light of the ending. I love how unconstrained she is by panels or rigid structures; the story art seems so much more organic when it's allowed however much room it needs.

Not a traditional haunted house story and that's absolutely for the best. I never settled into a sense of knowing just what kind of story this was, and on the rare moments I did, whatever expectations I did have were nicely subverted. It's unusual for an ending to reframe so much of what came before, with nothing contrived or forced about it. That'll sit with me, for sure.

When reading something like this, I'm often struck by the difference in how much time it takes to create a page vs how long it takes to read it. Probably a good reason to revisit this sooner than later, just to see what details I didn't pick up on the first time around.