This is one of those books that you may find gripping and hauntingly beautiful…or one that you may hate completely. Fuller creates a bleak world for the proganist, a girl called Peggy who is taken away into a cabin in the middle of nowhere by her father. If you are seeking a light-hearted read, then this is definitely not the book for you. The novel is dark and depressing from the beginning. It deals with some heavy topics, and has a dramatic conclusion which reflects the hidden horrors of her time away from humanity. Because of this, I do have to issue some trigger warnings to the reader (which you can contact me about if this is a concern, as they are spoilers). The following is a spoiler-free review however a spoiler section is found at the bottom with a spoiler warning beforehand.

In all honesty, this book was really slow to begin with. Time and time again I found myself thinking, when is the author going to get to the point? What is the point of all this rambling? I read a couple of pages each day, until I reached the last third of the novel where things finally started to pick up and I read the rest in one sitting. The ending was really interesting and it was one of those ‘Oh I see…now that makes sense’ kind of moments, although some people would find it too disturbing and vulgar for the book. The descriptions in the book are very vivid, particularly of Peggy’s time in the wilderness. On the other hand, the characters themselves were not to my liking; almost all of them bore signs of some sort of darkness. I suppose this is the very premise of the novel, so you either would be into that sort of thing or you wouldn’t.

Overall, if it were not for the ending, I would have rated this book 1/5 for the sheer length of time spent on repetitive descriptions. However, the last third of the book made up for it, bringing the rating to 2.5/5. So have a read if this seems like your sort of thing…or you could just read the last few pages if you are only in it for a plot-twist.

R/T: Thorn. This book is definitely a thorn. (Please see About section for more information)

Rating: 2.5/5

Spoiler….

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The girl is taken away by her father into the wilderness. Over the course of time the father starts thinking that she is the girl’s mother and starts to lose his grip. The girl, meanwhile, becomes acquainted with a man who lives in the wilderness who her father is not aware of and they have sex. During this time, her father lets her know that he wants to poison them both as he is fed up. The man she meets helps to save her from her father by killing him and they both run away into civilisation. When the girl wakes up the man is nowhere to be seen. It turns out that the man she met had never existed…she had been raped by her father and used her mind to imagine this man in order to deal with this emotional disturbance. She was also the one who killed him, not the imaginary man.