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After the death of their parents in a mountaineering accident, 14-year-old Lily and nine-year-old Violet are sent to live with their father's sister Clara, who was estranged from her brother throughout the girls' short lives. Clara is the epitome of a fairy tale villain; she's the wicked queen from Snow White, the witch from Rapunzel, and Cinderella's evil stepmother rolled into one. She has no interest in her nieces, beyond their inheritance. Upon being whisked away from the lives they know to Clara's remote home of Crescent Hill, the girls quickly discover that their new guardian is not only cruel, she's downright murderous. And the only thing that might save them is their own burgeoning gifts of magic.

I really enjoyed the first half of At the Bottom of the Garden, with its gothic setting and the ghostly manifestations Violet and Lily encounter in their aunt's home. This book switches between the POVs of Clara, Lily and Violet, and there's a definite YA sort of tone for all three, although the writing was more palatable to me than most of the other (admittedly few) YA books I have read as an adult. However, the middle section almost to the end of the story gets bogged down in the characters behaving as repetitively as an old psychical imprint haunting: Clara being cruel and selfish, Lily angry and powerless, Violet ethereal and imperiled, over and over and over again. This constant cycle got tiresome quite quickly, and I found myself getting tired of all of the characters, good and evil, and was just ready for the story to conclude.

Thank you to NetGalley and Del Ray for a digital advanced readers copy, At the Bottom of the Garden will be published on January 28, 2025.