Changes

Rebecca is not happy to be leaving London. She's not happy with her dad, she's not happy with her boyfriend, and she just generally an unhappy person. Having to move to a dead-end place like Winterfold doesn't help at all. Her only friend there is a strange girl named Ferelith who one hot summer's day shows her an abandoned mansion where two hundred years ago a priest performed horrible experiments on human corpses. He wanted to learn something from the dead. But what was it? And what does Ferelith really want from Rebecca?

It does have a lot of good points, though. Sedgwick is a skillful author no matter what he writes, and even though the plot does take longer than I would have liked to get going, it's never dull. About a hundred pages in, the tension really starts to mount, and I honestly did stay up until all hours of the night to finish it. The small-town atmosphere is good. Rebecca is a realistic teenager, and Ferelith is a sort of hippie/anarchist/goth hybrid which is interesting in itself. Their uneasy friendship forms a solid emotional centrepiece for the book.