Not what I expected, and I can't decide if that's a good thing or a bad thing. For one, I don't know that I would classify this as horror. It certainly has some horrific elements and scenes, but the pacing is generally very slow, with absolutely no suspense, and there are times when it's borderline cozy fantasy. (That's definitely not the right genre but more accurate than horror for a good 50% of the book.) It's really just in the last hundred or so pages that the pace finally picks up, and then we're cramming a whole lot of action into every page. I'm not sure if I would recommend this because it feels like you invest a lot of time (the older writing style is hard to push through, as well as the awkwardly large format of the physical copy) and I'm still a bit dubious about the payoff.

Also, there's something so disappointing about bad people twisting someone to make them evil, and then feeling justified in believing that person was always evil. It took away the satisfaction when she started getting her revenge.