This felt like a cheap, nasty thriller, with some shoe-horned references to The Turn of the Screw shoe-horned in and made less interesting and relevant. It began with the narrator's late-to-the-party observations of the cruelty of forced institutionnalisation and mistreatment of women in mental health facilities of the time, then took a turn which made the protagonist even less likeble/rootable. The eponymous Girl is infantilised, annoying and unbelievable, and finally turned stereotypical femme fatale. Extreme misogyny that drives the plot, setting and characters, which makes it an absolute slog to read. I didn't find anything original enough here to warrant the known, mundane unpleasantness of men exerting power over women, gaslighting them and ultimately destroying them. The ending wasn't satisfying or clever enough to outweigh that.

A strange gothic book. I didn’t realise when I picked it up that it was the second book in a series, so that may be why I didn’t enjoy it that much. 

The main character was odious but not very compelling, he was just annoying and pretentious. 

The writer tries to experiment with language by ‘verbing’ nouns, but it’s done indelicately and was just annoying. 

The story is slow and relies a lot of cliches, think mad woman in the attic, duplicitous asylum nurses and lots of pathetic fallacy. 

Not amazing