Really great book!

Such a good story! Thrilling read and great details. Could picture every scene. Would highly recommend this book

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Fascinating story

I enjoyed the story quite a lot. It made for compulsive listening. I had to know what happened next. Interesting characters and creepy setting, spooky happenings.

The audio was great - except for some wild pronunciation choices. Some were baffling, since two were homographs, but the wrong pronunciation was chosen each time. A bit jarring.

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Just what I was looking for!

This was such a good listen! The voice acting was perfect and did such a great job! It was creepy and mysterious, with the perfect pinch slow burn romance!

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4.5 Stars!

My first audiobook of the year!! It was a great choice really enjoyed this one and thought the narrator’s were excellent.

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was good

it was good I enjoyed it. I struggled at first to not dnf but I kept going and glad I did it was good.

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Autumnal cheese

A standard cosy read, although the plot is distractingly thin in some places unfortunately. Also I think the voice actor for Alice is actually from Teesside, so I cannot understand why I find her northern accent so unconvincing.

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Stick with it

This one was fascinating. I'm trying to read more outside my comfort zone, I feel it's a good way for an autistic semi-hermit to understand a wider range of people. I am not and, barring an exceeding surprising turn of events, am not ever likely to be, a teenaged lesbian. But my way into YA lesbian romance was via an intriguing school based dark mystery, which is right up my alley.

Had this not come out before Wednesday, I'd have taken that as the basis.

So the positive first. As a story & a mystery this was really enjoyable, with surprisingly relatable characters & a level of emotional involvement from me that I wasn't expecting. It's well told, engaging & I'd recommend it.

However, & I'm not sure how much of this is dodgy writing & how much is genre-specific so I may be wrong to criticise here, the prose was... not great in places. The use of almost florid descriptive language was fine but felt jarring & weird coming from a first person character. It would've been fine as a third person narrator but that's not how people think.

Also the insistence on over-detail, especially with regard to clothing made me want to confiscate the author's pen & sit them in an empty beige room for a month or six. Stop it!! "I pulled on my jeans" is fine, "I pulled on my dark flared jeans with the emerald stitching & gold alien print wings that I got from my brother's aunt's dog when they visited from Atlantic" is not!!

My other gripe was with the narration itself. The actresses were great & really suited the parts but they're professionals doing a professional recording, GIVE THEM GUIDANCE WITH HOW TO SAY WORDS. Seriously, the number of mispronounced words was such that by the end of the book I thought it was deliberate to troll the listener!!!

As others have, I nearly quit in the first hour, it was only the fact that I couldn't get a refund that made me stick with it. Persevere, it's worth it.

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I can’t finish this…

Sadly, I just can’t finish this. I attempted to return it just before the 2 hour mark, but found out that you can’t return books that have been brought with cash not credits (not sure what that’s all about!). I was tired so I decided to put it back on rather than look for something new. I am now almost at the end, but the story hasn’t improved. I have found it rather dull, awfully slow and I have been unable to engage with the characters at all.
This one’s not for me, sorry…

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Not great.

For a start, I found Alice's character insufferable, whereas I quite liked Lottie, but it was very hard to see how someone like Lottie would take to a character like Alice. The mystery of Carvell was interesting enough at first, but quickly grew ridiculous and the big reveal at the end was pointless. I also didn't much enjoy the romance aspect, as I didn't find it believable. On the whole, it was a frustrating reading experience that I couldn't wait to get over and done with.

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Awful and anachronistic

Is this set in the 90s? Is this anything other than a lazy attempt at appealing to readers - let's shoehorn in the LGBTQ+ community, let's pretend this is good representation of ace people.

There are consistent references to using phones with big screens. There are references to LED lights and multiples other items that would probably not be prevalent in the north of England in the 90s. They use slang that would not have been prevalent in the 90s, like calling someone a 'salty bi***'. Every so often, the book refers to the 1980s as being 'a decade ago' which was the only times I would remember this was supposed to be the 90s.

The audiobook itself was adequate. The accents were poor, and they mispronounced several words. Did no one do any quality control on this very popular book?

The story itself is interesting and I was intrigued by the society itself. But this wasn't enough to stop me from playing the book on 2.3x speed just to get through the last few chapters.

There are better books by and about women.

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