This book provides a variety of adjectives such as gothic, eerie, blunt, bleak, dark comedy, and grotesque! The antiheroine of the book, Winifred Notty, is a time-travelled, gender-reversed version of American Psycho's Patrick Bateman, with one big difference: she's made a monster instead of being born a villainess. The situations she's gone through since childhood, her psychologically damaged mother's attempts to take her life, and the way she's leaving the world may affect her deteriorated perspective.

She finally gets acceptance for her new governess job, teaching the Pounds family's two children: eight-year-old Andrew and his elder sister Drusilla. She's planned to instruct them in English, French, writing, music, dancing, drawing, and arithmetic, which will help Andrew prepare for his boarding school next year and Drusilla (who will focus on ornamental needlework) find a better suitor for herself instead of filling her head with extra knowledge.

Winifred gets introduced to the Pounds family: Mr. Pounds seems more excited about her arrival, taking her on long walks and requesting her attendance at the dinner table each night, while his wife reluctantly accepts her existence, more suspicious about her motives and acting hostile around her.

Winifred is not like a regular, obedient Victorian governess they hired, telling the worst kind of nightmarish dark stories (more brutal than the Grimm Brothers) at nighttime to the children, telling the people she's coming from a place where they eat children - and she's probably not joking. As we learn more about her past and her previous jobs at other houses that she took a little too far, we realize she's a really dangerous woman with a distorted and uniquely vicious mind. But interestingly, none of the people, including the servants of Ensor house, are like angels; they're even worse than her. When Winifred starts conducting her jaw-droppingly shocking destruction plan that leads her to give an unforgettable show at Christmas as a big gift to this family, the only thing you can do is stop reading this book when things get extremely gory or wear your big girl pants and read it until reaching the climax that will probably make you gasp or scream a little louder.

Overall: The unique, bold, extremely dark but sarcastic tone of the author makes your reading experience so special. The drawings inside the book, the heart-throbbing conclusion, unexpected twist, the vicious-sociopathic but interestingly engaging antiheroine, and eerie cover of the book made me clap harder for the entire execution! If you're open to reading something original, unexpected, gripping, and if historical gothic themes are your genre, this book will suit all your needs.

Many thanks to NetGalley and W.W. Norton & Company / Liveright for sharing this unique historical book's digital reviewer copy with me in exchange for my honest thoughts.