Romantic, creepy, and vivid novella about the forbidden love between two cousins in a large, falling-apart family. The title refers to the island where Viola washes up in "Twelfth Night." Cousins Maddy and Rogan are cast together in their high school production, and I've never read such a good description of the "drug" that theatre can become. I gobbled this one up and still find myself thinking about its many layers (family, talent, art, love, guilt, secrets, acting, and that magical discovery in the wall of the attic and what it means). I wasn't expecting where it went at the end, though. 
 Favorite quotes: 
 "The wisteria looked beautiful, blade-shaped leaves and clusters of blossoms like grapes made of blue tissue." 
 "A creepy archaeology of wallpaper peeled in layers from the walls -- fox hunters, lurid pink lilacs, Humpty Dumpty." 
 "'But talent -- if you don't encourage it, if you don't train it, it dies. It might run wild for a little while, but it will never mean anything. Like a wild horse. If you don't tame it and teach it to run on a track, to pace itself and bear a rider, it doesn't matter how fast it is. It's useless.'" 
 "'Think of it like this: you're building a house, a beautiful house, a little bit at a time out of all these things -- your voice, your body, your memory, how you move. If you do it right, if you put all the elements together, something happens. Something comes to live in that space you've made, inside you. Then you go onstage and people see it. They see you, but they also see this other -- thing -- that you've created. That you've built, that you're inside of.'" 
 "The bleak horror I'd felt earlier returned; the sense that I had somehow missed the real meaning of the world, which everyone but me had always known." 
 words I didn't know: susurrus, louche, intransigent, helices