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if you liked this book, please turn away. i'm not yucking your yum. i'm mad that my yum turned into a yuck.

alternative title: go to therapy so that the ghosts can scare the reader. considering how beautiful and haunting the cover is, i was expecting big scares and not a family drama that just happens to have ghosts hanging around. everyone uses the main character as their emotional punching bag. like she's pretentious and annoying but these people bullied her for existing and are equally annoying, if not more so. they constantly bring up shit that happened years and years ago, they're passive aggressive as fuck, and they get upset about things that didn't happen. there's so much unresolved shit that had nothing to do with the ghosts like there was a random anti-choice sermon in an italian church???? 🥴 why and what was the point of this. in fact, what was the point of a lot of the things that happened??

another reviewer said that this was "an infuriating book written for 'it’s wine o’clock somewhere' 'normal ppl scare me' type millennial women" which could not be more accurate. my last retail job used to attract these type of women all the fucking time and this is exactly the type of book catered to middle class white american women who think that hoarding rae dunn's cheapass shit and shopping at homegoods is equivalent to owning william sonoma items. i can imagine anna and her family yelling at me at the register for not wrapping their mass-produced $10 plate the way they want me to. italians would probably be offended by this book because it was so overtly pompous in a way that was like "rich white americans live-love-laugh'ing all over a country foreign to them." none of these issues were challenged. if there was an attempt to satirize their ignorance or challenge their tax-evading asses, i would have given this another star but these people just live like this. there were no scares, mostly a lot of irritating shit happening in the family that overshadowed all the creep factor.

i'd like to think that the ridiculous family drama annoyed the ghosts so much so that they couldn't do their jobs in scaring the reader 🤣