I was hooked from the first page of this book! The story is so interesting and the narrative progresses in such a flush and smooth way. One of my favourite things in a novel is a plot twist and this book definitely delivered! There was such an effective balance between things the reader could connect themselves and things that were so surprising that, at one point, I literally gasped aloud!

Tension and suspense is created in an effective and interesting manner, as well. I really enjoyed how Schwartz picked up the pace of the narrative using shorter chapters and then did the opposite when slowing down the pace again. I've seen this in novels before, but here it was done extremely well.

My one grievance, though, is lack of variation of puncutation. There are plenty of instances where the sentences would be much more rich if, instead of a mere full stop, the author used, for example, a semi-colon or a full colon or even a comma. There is an excessive use of full stops, in my opinion, to try and add tension and slow the pace of the story down, but a lot of the time it feels misplaced. There's also, in my opinion, too many conjunctions used in certain sentences. In one sentence alone I counted four or five uses of "and"!

Despite this, however, I really loved the way Schwartz describes an area / the setting. It's written perfectly: not too much nor too little said. And the imagery is beautiful. For example: Carolyn is described to look like a "garden fairy" at one point and the way she is described to look is so soft and pretty. I found that Schwartz favours similes, which is something I thoroughly enjoyed. I also noted and loved the reoccurring imagery and metaphor of the cicada and how its connotations of rebirth, renewal, and transformation paired perfectly the narrative.