I wanted a lot more from this book than I got. The writing was good but I couldn’t get into the story or any of the characters.

This one was a bit disappointing.

Marketed as a Black Swan meets Paranormal Activity set the tone for an exciting paranormal meets psychological thriller and I couldn’t have been more excited to read this book and the cover itself is gorgeous but once I got into it I found myself questioning the point of the entire story. Our lead character Marianne just had her life turned upside down and immediately after getting dropped off at her aunt’s house strange things start to happen making her question whether or not she’s possessed and with no one except the goth girl Ron to talk to she sets off to try and figure out the cause of her haunting and end it once and for all.

For me the entire paranormal aspect didn’t work to the point that I started to think that was on purpose in order to add weight to the psychological aspect of the book but then the more I read the more I sat there wondering what the heck was going on and each new incident did nothing to further the story other than suggest the decline in Marianne’s own psyche and the side characters didn’t believe anything strange was happening but by the end we where supposed to believe not only did they sit and listen but accepted it all when a chapter ago they had someone committed for the same claims.

I get where they were trying to allude to plot elements in the Black Swan but where one managed to show the decline with a personification of another character as a result of years of self loathing and a strive for perfection, this book tries to do it in a way that offers you no real insight as to why so the big moment flops. Everything with the family dynamic was problematic yes, but not to the point that what happened to create the events that are plaguing Marianne now made sense or a foreshadowing of when this big moment that would come back to haunt her actually happened.

I don’t know this book might work for some people but for me it was a huge miss, I think it’s just a matter of trying to do too much at once or trying to pull off something deep and not quite achieving it.

**thanks to the publishers and netgalley for providing an arc in exchange for a fair and honest review**