The prose is exquisite and I kept reading because I very much enjoyed the words and sentence structure but for everything I liked in the story, Miranda drug in so many tropes I detest (view spoiler)[love triangle, cheating, an unreliable narrator who hides facts just for kicks, a ridiculous amount of unanswered questions (hide spoiler)], so much so that it felt like a zero-sum game in how much I would actually enjoy the novel: two and a half stars but I am rounding up to three. Miranda's new novel, The Perfect Stranger, is a lot tighter, if more conventional, yet still contains all of the aspects I liked in her adult debut.