Louisa Cosgrove thinks she's going to become a lady's companion. Instead she ends up at Wildthorn Hall, an insane asylum where they call even her very identity into question. Louisa must revisit the events that led up to her arrival while simultaneously attempting to escape, and inadvertently developing relationships with another patient and a caretaker. Louisa attempts to make sense of a life in which she hoped to become a doctor like her father, with his blessing before he died, despite her mother's worries and brother's jealousy. She must also figure out how a beloved aunt and cousin fit into the picture. 
 Curlz font on the cover aside, this book attempts to tackle some big issues. The Victorian setting provides a wonderful societal conflict for Louisa's hopes to become a daughter. With a lesbian main character, the novel also tackles issues of sexuality without making Louisa's sexuality the point. Louisa fights much harder to become a doctor than anything to do with her sexuality. In fact, no one in her family ever seems to call her sexuality into question. They worry about her oddness and medical knowledge corrupting her in some way, but sexuality never seems to play into it, except in Louisa's own worries. While it can be slightly troubling that the novel sometimes wants to equate Louisa's sexuality with her societal deviance, this conclusion can also be a stretch. Rather, Louisa had more pressing matters to worry about than the big reveal being her sexuality itself. I appreciated that it was a part of her, and that was that. 
 While the world building in terms of what flashbacks happened when kept the pace going, some world building left me wanting. The asylum never fully established the foreboding tone it seemed to want to live within. Additionally, most of the characters inhabiting that world felt stock and flat. There was damaged young girl who was not actually crazy. The doctor out to make a buck for himself more than care for any patient. The cruel overseer. The kind young nurse. I would have liked to spend some more time really exploring and flushing out this world. It didn't feel nearly as claustrophobic as it could have, and that tone would have helped raise the stakes for Louisa's escape. Especially as the novel itself is set in Victorian England because of how repressive the world was, I would have been interested to see more of how Eagland thought Victorian England and a Victorian insane asylum compared for females through the juxtaposition of place. 
 While the flow of this novel was overall successful, I can't say that anything ever really surprised me, especially in terms of the characters. There were some typos in the Kindle edition I was reading that jarred me out of the world as well. And yet, I found myself wanting to read on. It was not hard to get through, and I wanted to know what happened. And, while nothing necessarily shocked me, neither did anything feel out of place in what Eagland created.