Amber and her family are moving into the house where her parents were murdered. This takes place during the Covid pandemic. The movers wear their masks incorrectly under their noses, giving us a touch of real-life horror thrown into this supernatural tale.

Amber was already a remote worker when the Covid pandemic broke out. Her firefighter husband Ben is unable to work from home, so he still leaves Amber alone with the kids for several days in a row during his shift. Their daughter is too young to go to school, so she’d be home during the day regardless. The only impact Covid has on their lives is their son has remote school.

Amber gets angry at her kids for just being kids and doing things like trying to help with dinner, but it’s understandable she’d feel this way after being stuck alone with them for days on end.

She tells us Ben is horrible and she would have left him long ago, except she’s afraid of being alone and afraid of Ben telling her secrets. We don’t actually see Ben do anything horrible, so this makes me think we’ve got an unreliable narrator.

She criticizes Ben for his tone of voice, facial expressions, and things she thinks he’s implying. Her life would be a lot easier if she could let little things like this go. She also worries too much about what the neighbors think. She must have an anxiety disorder the way she treats minor things like they’re life-or-death emergencies.

She doesn’t want to talk to her husband about the haunting or the deaths in her family and gets mad at him when he wants to talk about the death of his best friend. She prefers to keep things to herself, but this cuts her off from other people.

It doesn’t seem like Amber actually likes anybody. She had a falling out with her parents and sister even though they didn’t seem to do anything wrong. If you’re mad at everybody in the world, you might want to stop and ask yourself if maybe you’re the problem. Just saying.

The novel alternates between 2020 and Amber’s childhood during the late 1990s. I found the childhood flashbacks more tense than the present-day haunting. Maybe because the childhood bullying has real consequences while the present-day haunting is repeatedly dismissed, making it feel less important. Amber remains in denial about her house being haunted long after anyone else would have accepted it.

This novel builds tension slowly, a bit too slowly for me. The haunting scenes in the present felt somewhat repetitive. These scenes should be upping the ante the way the childhood scenes did. Instead, the present-day scenes felt like variations on a theme. Similar things keep happening without the tension increasing.

Due to the nature of the haunting, Amber comes to fear mirrors, but finds herself attracted to fire. The pyrophilia scenes were interesting. I think they were well-written and very original. I also liked the tense childhood flashbacks. The characters felt like real people. I wasn’t able to guess the surprise twist until it happened either. So, there’s a lot to like about this book, even if I didn’t like everything.