3.5 rounded down? What... to say. I was drawn to read this because someone described it to me and I became deeply interested in the tropes it explored. Indeed, for the majority of the book this was a 4-star read for me. But T. Kingfisher's voice doesn't work for me in part because it utterly kills and/or undercuts suspense and most of its seriousness. Listening to the audiobook improved the experience substantially because the narrator was so dynamic and infused so, so much character into the narration. I truly enjoyed myself. It was also quite a propulsive story: I wanted to keep reading, and would have if not for pesky things like obligations and tasks. Overall I would call this an enjoyable bit of Appalachian horror, even if it does lean away from horror and into suspense/thriller trappings in the back 30%.

Characters are a bit thin. Mouse's narration frequently irritated me and threw me out, and is the reason this didn't stay rounded up to 4. Generally this is a personal preference; I would describe Kingfisher's narration as a more refined version of Mur Lafferty and Andy Weir. There is most definitely a market for this style of narration; I am not it. That said, the book's final pages deal with the aftermath of its major events, and suddenly the voice is much graver... and I didn't buy the weight of these final pages when the same weight was constantly undercut throughout by the narrative voice. The story felt more like 2.5 stories stitched together at times.

I did take a lot out of this book, though, and I liked it better than The Hollow Places by quite a bit. I would (and soon will) pick up more T. Kingfisher—by no means an author I'm avoiding, but an author I need to be in the right mood to enjoy.