The Underneath

by Melanie Finn

With the assurance and grace of her acclaimed novel The Gloaming— which earned her comparisons to Patricia Highsmith—Melanie Finn returns with a precisely layered and tense new literary thriller. The Underneath follows Kay Ward, a former journalist struggling with the constraints of motherhood. Along with her husband and two children, she rents a quaint Vermont farmhouse for the summer. The idea is to disconnect from their work-based lifestyle—that had her doggedly pursuing a genocidal leader of child soldiers known as General Christmas, even through Kay's pregnancy and the birth of their second child—in an effort to repair their shaky marriage. It isn't long before Kay's husband is called away and she discovers a mysterious crawlspace in the rental with unsettling writing etched into the wall. Alongside some of the house's other curiosities and local sleuthing, Kay is led to believe that something terrible may have happened to the home's owners. Kay's investigation leads her to a local logger, Ben Comeau, a man beset with his own complicated and violent past. A product of the foster system and life-long resident of the Northeast Kingdom, Ben struggles to overcome his situation, and to help an abused child whose addict mother is too incapacitated to care about the boy's plight. The Underneath is an intelligent and considerate exploration of violence—both personal and social—and whether violence may ever be justified.
Read Melanie Finn's essay about how the novel The Underneath came to be written.

Genres: Fiction, Mystery, Thriller, Mystery Thriller, Suspense, Horror, Crime

308 pages, Hardcover

First published May 3, 2018

About the author

Melanie Finn was born and raised in Kenya and the US. She is author of four critically acclaimed "literary thrillers," Away From You (2004), The Gloaming (2016), The Underneath (2018) and The Hare (2021). While working in a remote area of Tanzania as the writer and producer of the DisneyNature flamigo epic, The Crimson Wing, she founded Natron Healthcare, a small charity focused on bringing health education and health service to under resourced communities in that area. She lives with her husband, the wildlife filmmaker Matt Aeberhard, and their twin daughters on a mountainside in northern Vermont.

Reviews

[Virginia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kay takes a step inside the cabin. She is an actor following a set of stage directions. Or, it is as if she’d planned this herself months ago. She’s been completely true to herself, and she’s brought herself here.

This has been one of the most unsettling, uncomfortable books I’ve read in ages and I loved every second of it. The entire book was so precisely stage-managed and balanced that if I’d missed a sentence somewhere it would have thrown the whole thing off. Each of the three timelines has its own floral symbol which also added a significant flourish to the narrative. I didn’t love or even like most of the characters but I felt them deeply and wanted - something different, I think, for each of them. Kay is dislikable and selfish and a rotten mother and I have been in her shoes so many times that she was me and I wanted so much for her. Any reader who condemned her actions with Freya has never lived full time with an 11-year-old girl. The author has much to say about the purpose of violence and the concept that it justifies some outcomes, and there is at least one outcome here that the reader would have difficulty arguing with. That ending though - I have so many questions. Without spoilers, there are so many parallels in the last few pages with Ben’s impossible dream for his friend Frank. I want to believe - and yet. 5 stars.

[Rebecca]

I requested this on the strength of Finn’s previous novel, Shame (retitled The Gloaming), which I reviewed for Third Way magazine and found to be a riveting and profound thriller. Unfortunately, I didn’t make it very far in this one. Jumping between italicized passages set in Africa and Kay and Michael’s troubled marriage playing out its end in Vermont 10 years later, the narrative feels fragmented. Kay is not a compelling character compared to Pilgrim.

Another strand is about Ben Comeau and his drug-addicted friend (and lover?) Shevaunne. I skimmed ahead a bit to see what might happen. Kay ransacks her rental house for clues to what happened to the owners and finds a cache of cookbooks and a few local numbers in the call log, including one for Comeau Logging – so it’s clear all these subplots will meet up at some point. I didn’t have the patience to hang around. There is a lot of gritty violence towards animals, too (putting down a stray cat, hunting moose, trapping coyotes).

The best lines are about the crumbling marriage and reminded me of Alexandra Fuller’s Leaving Before the Rains Come: “it was as if their marital arguments, both spoken and furiously internalized, had created a white noise, filling the space” & “marriage did not exist as a weight and a shape, it was a wish thrown into a well.” (I read the first 15 pages and skimmed to p. 80.)

[Kath Middleton · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’m finding this a very difficult book to review. I was interested enough to finish it but I have to say I found it hard going in places. There are three strands here, one featuring Kay and her children in the present day, one of her past in Africa as a journalist, and one of Ben, a man who makes a living cutting forests and dealing in drugs. None of the characters was particularly likeable and it helps a reader to have someone to root for. In many ways the Africa sections seemed intrusive. If you detest animal or human (child) cruelty this book will definitely not be for you. Generally speaking I found the writing good but the subjects abhorrent. I’m sure these things do happen but it’s not entertainment.

[Mike A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is entertaining and in places it struck me as profound, but what takes it to the top is the prose of Melanie Finn. I did roll my eyes towards the end, but don't nitpick. To make no mistake about it, if Melanie Finn writes anything, the English language seems vindicated, even radiant. I think her narrative voice is the most interesting in contemporary literature. Someday, everyone will know this.

[Claire Fuller]

I really enjoyed this - the third Finn novel I've read in quick succession. Kay is spending the summer with her family in Vermont when she becomes obsessed with who owns the house they're renting and where they are now, until she puts this need for the truth before her own family. In flashbacks we learn about when she was a journalist in Uganda, and what choices she made also made then about truth v. family. Interspersed with Kay's story, is Ben's - a logger who lives near Kay's Vermont house, and the question is raised whether violence can ever be justified.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 rounded up

Wouldn’t recommend starting with this one if you’re new to Finn’s work, but it’s a solid novel. Thematically it reminded me of O Beautiful! (by Jung Yun).

[Valeri · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow. What a deep, dark and beautiful book

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

A former investigative journalist who once tracked an African warlord tries to piece her stale marriage back together during a summer in rural Vermont. When that fails, and her husband leaves unexpectedly for “work,” her investigative instincts turn to the owners of the house she’s renting, who seem to have disappeared. What she finds is the dark underbelly of a community savaged by opioid addiction and drug trafficking, and lives damaged by violence and trauma. As she digs deeper into the missing homeowners' lives, she begins to buckle under the responsibilities of motherhood, and grieves the loss of her career and her sense of self. This unflinching, taut literary thriller dares to expose the ways in which all forms of human violence--even the despotic violence of a distant regime--underscores who we are as a culture and as individuals.

[MR I · Rating 2 out of 5]

Rather underwhelmed. The blurb on the back cover made it seem a more exciting read than it ended up being. I couldn't really connect with Kay (one of the main characters) or understand the reasoning behind most of her actions. Ben was a more interesting character and with a better story but I didn't really enjoy the ending.
Overall, the writing was solid but the story felt underdeveloped in areas and it also just felt like a story that really didn't need to be told. It really wasn't all that interesting to me.

[Sharon · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.75 ... wow, intense...review to follow...already looking up other reads from this author.

[Brian Grover · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book opens with a wife standing behind her husband, holding a hammer above his head and deciding whether to brain him with it. Okay Melanie Finn I'm interested, tell me more!

I'm an idiot, I picked this up thinking it was going to be a horror story about what this couple finds in the crawlspace of the house they're renting in rural Vermont. It's not - it's actually more interesting than that. It's really about violence, and how hard it is to break the cycle of abuse when you've grown up with a life of abuse yourself. A lot of terrible stuff happens in this book, or is referenced and thankfully not described. But it never feels gratuitous, it's smart and thoughtful, and I really enjoyed it.

[Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall I really enjoyed the writing and thought both stories were very interesting. My complaint is with the intersection of these stories.
Kay’s main story is about struggling with motherhood and her marriage and missing the journalist she used to be.
Ben’s story is about doing what he can to get out of the life he was forced into and trying to keep another boy from going through what he did, no matter how misguided he may have been.
These stories intersect in Kay’s investigation into the owner of her rental home, which never really seemed all that important. I wish the stories butted against each other more, but they kind of passed by like two cars on a highway that happen to be going the same direction.
I liked both perspectives, but the book may have benefitted on focusing on just one, though it’s incredibly hard to choose which.

[Philomena Callan Cheekypee · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my first and hopefully not my last read by this author as I really enjoyed this story.

Kay and her family leave England to stay in Vermont. They are hoping a break will do them good however that all changes when her husband Michael is called away for work.

Kay finds herself with plenty of questions about the house she’s staying in and her journalistic talent comes out when she starts investigating.

A well written story that I enjoyed though it may not be for everyone.

[Fiona · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don’t exactly know what to say about this book, the writing is fantastic and really draws you in, but it was also just really gruesome in parts and the plot didn’t really feel resolved.

[Barksdale Penick · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this off a stack of staff recommendations at City Lights in San Francisco and it did not disappoint. A family from London takes a house in Vermont, which looks bucolic and suitable for some time in the US. Under that beauty, poverty lives in mobile homes with heroin and junk food and forgotten kids.

The parents are journalists who have roamed the world of armies and flash points and dying children and unspeakable cruelty. Their relationship is unsettled and I found the presentation of their troubles to be such a strong aspect of this book. Matters aren't clear--why did Michael leave Vermont to go to Africa unexpectedly? Our heroine, Kay, thinks he is having an affair but she doesn't really know and we never do. Life is of course sometimes like that and many points in this story are never explained to the reader. Maybe that is why there were some negative reviews, but I found it quite realistic.

As the book develops there is a sense of foreboding--the maybe there is a body in the basement type of atmosphere. There are mysteries to be unraveled in this book but they aren't the point. Much is left unsaid and I found that to be really effective. As was the difficulty of a loving mother to understand her children and her feelings about them--parents can be mad at kids and selfish without being bad parents. And it has a happy ending, in a sense. At least maybe one five year old has a chance.

[Sandy Wilmering · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kay, her husband Michael, and their two children come from England to rent a farmhouse in Vermont for the summer. The idea is to escape their problems back home and work on their marriage. However, Michael almost immediately gets called away, which adds to the disconnect they are already feeling. While exploring the house, Kay finds some things that set off her radar as a journalist. Her pursuit for answers only seems to produce more questions, such as where is the owner of the house and why does everyone seem so evasive when asked about him?
The book also provides chapters on Kay's experiences as a journalist, and how they helped define who she is as a wife and mother. We also follow the story of Ben, a local, and how the violence in his childhood affects him in the present, both good and bad.
I liked the quick pace of the book for each of the different story lines. However, I had a hard time liking Kay. She seems very self-centered and focused on getting "the story" at the expense of being a better wife and mother. Although I felt empathy for the way Ben was raised, I also had a hard time accepting some of the choices he makes. The book seemed to be brewing to a big finish but instead felt anti-climatic.

[David Grosskopf · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Underneath is a vital, brutal book.

We follow most closely Kay, a war journalist covering vicious child soldiery in and around Uganda, and she is duly unblenching in the face of violence, sexuality, deviant morality. She and the book interrogate violence to its face, to observe and to wonder about a man who can kill and kill again and yet be tender, helpful, deeply generous, who can be a loyal friend and adoptive father, and from whom killing is also a kindness, as with a suffering moose (37); she wonders about another man with warlord power who presides over and commits horrors of amputations, rapes, killings, and also hospitality and ruthless fair-mindedness; and she drinks herself stupid over her own maternal violences, facing a capacity of hatred for her own children, a delicious freedom were she to give in to it (266), or, from one of the earliest scenes of the book, facing a capacity for murder itself, as she brandishes a hammer behind her aggravating husband: “she imagined the tipping point, where cause irrevocably becomes effect” (7).

The first man, Ben, we get to know intimately, and we know the violences of his upbringing in foster homes, and especially the abuse to his deep friend Frank by the terrible father Ammon, in the house in rural Vermont Kay and her husband will eventually rent, and whose mysterious traces will spark Kay's journalistic curiosity. Ben struggles to make it, to leave, ideally with Frank, and then with the greatly abused child of a meth-starved woman Ben knows from the system: Ben's means are predatory forestry and drug deals pushed by cold operators.

Ben yearns to take good care of Jake the way neither Ben nor Frank had been cared for, and we see the goodness, the decency, the heart in this most especially immediately when this is juxtaposed against an especially terrible parenting moment in a scene with Kay, when she burns her hand and the kids laugh and she calls her daughter a bitch (183). The contrast is abrupt enough to reprise this theme of violence and vitality.

With the Ugandan warlord, in italicized episodes from the past, the questions are more direct. While she is pregnant and vulnerable with her first child ("like a ripe peach," page 204), she travels alone to meet with General Christmas whose child soldiers are known as his elves, knowing they have cut children from their mothers in the past, and prepared to question him about even this when he cheekily asks if she's nervous: “I wonder what it feels like for a man to do such a thing. Does it make him less of a man or more of one, that you are not afraid of committing the worst crime” (205).

Then Kay’s interview becomes shockingly direct: “I want to know when you first felt evil” (207). General Christmas tells her that her “innocence is a failure or imagination” (208), that he is the accumulation of what he's done and what’s been done to him (209), and then Kay reflects on free will or fate, the point of God in either case, and what it would be to achieve “a complete neutrality of being, like the atoms in an acorn or a stone” (211).

All of this philosophical abstraction General Christmas teases and then makes manifest for Kay in the most monstrous way possible: first, when preeclampsia is threatening the life of her unborn baby, inviting Kay to use his helicopter to get to good care and honoring her request to bring a deserving mother and her two children with her (255), but then, as the blades of the helicopter spin for takeoff, when the general now says the others cannot come after all, giving Kay the Sophie’s choice: you can take your child, or you can take hers and leave yours. “You asked me what it felt like,” General Christmas says wryly (281).

The Underneath seems to show us, again and again, choices of violence, and what is bought by them. Kay knows that her life as a white woman comes with a certain protection, and she wrestles with what’s underneath it, selfishness, evil, violence, whatever it might be, and she has lived enough stark episodes in Uganda where she has made the explicit choice to lean on those advantages, such as when she rises in that chopper with her baby, leaving her friends to their sad fates below. In one chapter, Kay considers something her husband did to a Ugandan boy—stabbed a precious plastic container full of holes: Kay says of Michael, “What if I didn’t care, really, that he was a selfish asshole, selfishness having value in our white lives” (131).

There is a moment when Kay crawls into the cupboard where Frank had from his father, a safe dark place, but also one not similar to boxes in which prisoners were kept in the kind of countries Kay would visit as a correspondent. She wakes there, imagining horrors of violent nations, “a butterfly alighting on an oozing, dark flower.” From the safety of the prison-cupboard, “she felt her heart, insistent and indifferent to whether she was good or bad, mother or un-mother, indifferent as the stars to what she thought and felt and did. It would beat on if she never saw her children again […], if school girls were raped, if boys were made to kill” (259). It seems as if the complete neutrality of being is hunched and stunted. Morality and violence are rooted in ways we just get by.

[Michelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think I'm being a bit hard on this book, but I liked the first two-thirds much better than the last.

[Cherise Wolas · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a tense and harrowing novel about lives affected by violence, from childhood abuse or from participating as an outsider and onlooker. This is the second novel by Finn that I've recently read. The first was The Gloaming which I thought was marvelous, and which partly took place in Africa. Here Africa is again represented, but outside the main forward-moving story. There are several narrative strands in this novel. First, we are in Africa in flashbacks with Kay, when she's Kay Norton, a white journalist in war-torn places, single, cynical and fearless. Later, when she's Kay Ward, now married to documentary filmmaker Michael, and despite being pregnant with her second child, she's in Uganda to interview General Christmas, a warlord who commits atrocities and has a band of child soldiers. The second strand is Kay and her family in the present day, living in a remote house in Vermont for the summer, where her anger and frustration about her life is palpable. She's no longer the journalist she was, and she thinks her husband is having an affair. She's considering writing a book about her experiences in those far-flung places, but doesn't get very far. The house they are renting calls to her -- what happened to Frank and Maria and their two children who owned it and lived in it? It's a mystery that compels her and prods her forward into personal danger, neglecting her children, drinking heavily, and coming close to the people who know the secret about that family. The third narrative strand involves Ben Comeau, an illegal logger, a Vermont native, in a state that has become rife with opioid and heroin addiction, where there's never enough money, and no way to get out. Ben has had a terrible childhood, his mother was a junkie and he was abused. His best friend was Frank, the now missing homeowner, who also suffered heinously at the hands of his father, Ammon, a vicious trapper. Ben sweet-talks unsuspecting homeowners', saying he'll "curate" their forest-heavy land, then clear-cuts everything. The wood is transported, as a way to move heroin over the border into Canada. Ben has taken on Shauvanne, a woman he knew in high school and her mute 5 year old son Jake, who has been badly abused because of his junkie mother. Ben has no interest in Shauvanne, but he wants to save Jake. Violence permeates throughout the novel in every day life, in the past, and possibly in the future. How does violence warp people? And once immersed in violence, can you ever go backwards? There is a flickering of hope at the end, with the possibility of redemption for both Kay and Ben. This is a compelling and intelligent novel.

[Devon · Rating 3 out of 5]

In The Underneath by Melanie Finn, Kay, her husband, and two children settle in Vermont to have a change of pace from London during the summer. Kay has a journalist’s mind, so when she finds a little crawl space in the bathroom, she begins to pick at the threads to find if something is there, which leads her to a logger named Ben. There are multiple POVs: Kay in the past, Kay in the present, Ben in the past, and Ben in the present.

My biggest problem with this is that I was expecting some full blown, big mystery with surprise twists. It sounded like it would be a thriller, but what you see is what you get. The story is that the homeowner is dead, which one would have assumed from the start, and that he’d killed himself.

There is drug dealing and poverty. There’s also a lot of mentions of rape—Kay idly wonders about rape or brings up rape on several occasions and is nearly raped herself at one point (maybe two points?)—and there is also a lot of animal brutality. The book is INTERESTING in that I wanted to keep reading, but it’s exceedingly grim. None of the characters are all that likeable; Ben is a liar screwing people by completely destroying forests as well as a multiple murderer (he’s doing it for the abused kid he’s decided to adopt!), and Kay is just all around terrible (drinking a lot, forgetting to pick up her kids several times, almost letting them drown when she falls asleep at the lake (!!), having an affair while constantly angrily thinking her husband is cheating on her, calling her daughter a bitch for laughing at her when she burned her hand (her son laughed, too, but she didn’t scream at him)). I’m also confused how Kay managed to survive violent, turbulent, chaotic times in Africa when, in America, she chooses to leave her doors unlocked on purpose and gets fall down drunk at a bar to the point two men try to carry her away and then beat her.

This is, in the end, not the mystery I thought it was but rather a look at what “evil” really is and how ordinary people can indulge in it without considering themselves evil or even contemplate how terrible their actions are. 3.5 stars.

[Nancy Traver · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have had some dark thoughts about my husband (Marriage will do that to you.) but I never dreamed of hitting him from behind with a claw hammer. Yes, this marriage between Kay and Michael is on the rocks, and renting a secluded farmhouse in rural upstate Vermont is not going to save it. Kay is a former journalist, now raising their two kids on her own as her husband takes off on a reporting junket continents away from the family. She’s bitter, resentful and bored. (Haven’t we all been there?) But the journalist in her can’t stop asking questions about the farmhouse she’s renting. She senses some violence and tragedy occurred there, and she’s determined to uncover it. Her pursuit leads her to Ben, a logger/heroin dealer who has taken in an addict with a young son, Jake. Like Jake, Ben grew up abused and neglected by his addict mom; Ben is determined to spare Jake the same fate. This book is about violence, sexual assault, murder, drug addiction, overdose, suicide, animal cruelty -- you name it, it’s all here. But Finn has skillfully woven together all the disparate threads to create a propulsive thriller. It works!

[Sapphire · Rating 4 out of 5]

In a bid to make their marriage better, Kay and Michael, move from England to Vermont, but Michael is then almost immediately called away for work, leaving Kay investigating things she has discovered regarding the farmhouse they are renting.

Her journalism experience helps her to uncover a much darker side of life connected to where she is staying and the people associated with it.

The other threads in this book; backtracking to Africa and Ben, a man involved in criminality and drug trafficking, make for an interesting read, but not one which will be enjoyed by anyone with an aversion to read about child or animal cruelty, drugs or violence.

The book is well-written and contains a good amount of suspense, but some of it is quite slow and I also couldn't work out why Kay made some of the decisions she did. I was also equally unsure about the ending. It did, however, outline a lot of the issues with society.

[Loocuh Frayshure · Rating 5 out of 5]

We live in a non-literate time where it becomes rare for books to explode in fame—if they do, they’re usually bottom of the barrel trash. I’ve grown apathetic and accepting of this, or so I thought, but then this book came along fills my bile ducts to bursting over the fact that most people, especially Americans, will never know this story exists.

It isn’t the most original plot in the world, but it’s the fucking PROSE mastery that made me fly through this, almost obsessively plowing through the last half of the book in one day. Finn can WRITE. And my god is it something that she’s published by an Ohio indie press.

This ain’t your mom or dad’s thrilller—no Lifetime, Gillian Flynn, whatever here. This is brutal, and filthy, and hateful, and traumatized, and so raw American no name shitsville child hell suffering. Fuck yeah.

[Maggie Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

A complex, layered, and exceedingly well-written novel with lots of facets including the opiod crisis and how it's effecting rural New England, women's role in marriage vs. the man's, atmospheric gritty creepy dread as Kay, the mother and a former overseas journalist, delves into a mystery of the house she's rented for the summer and, in doing so, puts herself in peril. Very honest and real depiction of a mother and her love/hate feelings toward her children, her absent husband, as she slowly goes a little mad in the evocative rural Vermont setting. The ending was not what I expected, but it made sense and lent a grace note to a terrific novel. Parts of this make for difficult reading as Finn deals with child neglect, drug use, and murder, but ultimately, she has written a gem.

[LeastTorque · Rating 4 out of 5]

This author brings an intensity to every moment, from the most life-threatening situations to the funny kids-say-the-darndest-things-and-so-do-grownups moments. I laughed out loud, I shuddered and ached, I got shocked and horrified and given hope. The lingering effects of evil and child abuse, the cycle reaching back into the depths of time; economic desperation and disparities; the difficulty of knowing another, of parenting, of making it in this world; and copious other themes are integrated into a slow boil whole. I read this book over many days rather than the usual two, and the savoring made it all the better. The more I think about it, the more incredible the weave becomes.

[Bill · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was the wrong one for me. I was hoping for a mystery set in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom. I was expecting dark, but not this dark. After a long career in child protection, I know what unspeakable things parents and others do to children. I already knew that too many people become parents who have no business raising children. Honestly The Underneath sent me into a funk. I only finished it because it was short and I wanted closure. I can't say any more about the book without spoiling it, so I'm done. I intend to read other reviews and perhaps I'll return to revise my review.

[Byram · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting and well-written narrative about dealing with trauma and trying to move beyond it without sinking your family and your relations with family into it. Character development was good, and the reflections on the past were easily the strongest parts of the story. It didn't always work for me, with some things feeling a little forced and others too vague, but in the end you couldn't help yourself rooting for these deeply flawed but strangely relatable individuals and how they navigate a world in which the idea of family is corrupted so early on. A worthwhile quick read.

[Amelia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although I feel this book is technically very well written, I had a hard time enjoying it. As someone who grew up in the part of Vermont where this story is set, something about this book doesn’t sit right with me. The social issues that the book centers around are very real, but it felt like the author was exploring them in a way that was almost voyeuristic- an outsider sensationalizing tragedy. I also found it jarring that she used many real names of local places and businesses. Maybe I would have enjoyed the book more if it wasn’t about my home…

[Olivia Ward · Rating 4 out of 5]

A dark story of redemption, I was immediately drawn in by Finn's lyric writing style. It's a thrilling tale of the past, present, and hopes for the future. I enjoyed the overlapping stories and being introduced to the unique elements of this story. I read about things I normally wouldn't (e.g. conflicts in Africa, opioid epidemic).

If you're looking for a feel-good story, keep looking. You've come to the right pages if you're looking for a raw, heartbreaking read.

[Anne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quite good actually as I was thinking it would be a big flop considering the ratings. Its well-written, however, none of the characters are likeable. Everyone has their own issues and dark history. Maybe its because of that kind of chaos that drew me into the story. It also has this air of mystery but I disliked how it jumps to the past and back. Sometimes, I tend to get distracted with this type of writing style.