I was pulled in by the clear, direct prose in this book and hooked by the unique characterization of the narrator— a feral, unpredictable and sometimes violent little girl named Merricat. The central mystery is the mass poisoning of the Blackwood family, for which Merricat’s oldest sister was tried and found innocent. This book is deliciously gothic, and scratched the itch of reading about a spooky old family in a spooky old house. Merricat’s narration reminded me at times of Scout in “To Kill A Mockingbird” — this story has none of the sociopolitical gravity/complexity, but the two are similar in terms of having a distorted and aggrandizing view of the world. I knocked off a star because I found the ending to be anticlimactic; the text seemed more intent on making an artistic statement than achieving a cathartic resolution. However I give the author big points for the story’s brevity; the prose is crystal-clear and stripped down to the bone.