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What's the point of a review? I loved it, I read the whole thing on my ipad in bed in about two hours last night, it's very good and scratched all of the Allie Brosh itches that we've been experiencing for the last seven years.

I most enjoyed the story about conquering her fears with exposure therapy. And only our Allie would come up with the exact strategy for exposure therapy that she employed.

In conclusion, good stuff. You should read it, especially if you liked [b:Hyperbole and a Half|17571564|Hyperbole and a Half Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened|Allie Brosh|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1409522492l/17571564.SY75.jpg|24510592] in either book or blog form.

Last night, ten to fifteen minutes of light pre-bed reading turned into an hour and a half of obsessive page turning. Today, even in daylight, my own victorian house feels creepy and weird. I blame the San Francisco fog.

A quick précis of the plot: Noemí's father gets a concerning letter from her newlywed cousin Catalina. He dispatches Noemí to visit her and investigate, and so she treks to rural Hidalgo and Catalina's new home, a ramshackle decaying old-money mansion owned by the local mining family. Our mystery starts with "what's wrong with Catalina?", and quickly spirals into "what's wrong with this house?" and "what's wrong with this family?"

Every line in this novel is building something: either putting a new brick into the wall of its immersive setting, or bringing the main character Noemí to life, or putting her into jeopardy. The creepy, ramshackle old mansion that's at the heart of this story is a character in its own right. I can vividly imagine this tiny postcolonial mining town, and the mist and the trees and even the mushrooms that dot the cemetery.

And the end result of all that methodical construction is a novel that really holds together. I was trying to figure out what was going on with Catalina right alongside Noemí. As the tension built, I felt it in my shoulders and neck. And then I was caught flat-footed and slack-jawed by the plot, which is how I wound up spending my evening and early morning reading when I really ought to have been asleep.

One tiny, final observation that needs to be hidden behind a spoiler tag: I already didn't like mushrooms.

I found the [b:Doomsday Book|24983|Doomsday Book (Oxford Time Travel, #1)|Connie Willis|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1403972500s/24983.jpg|2439628] to be hilarious and oddly moving. I had hoped the semi-sequel, a separate story in the same universe, would be more of the same. So I started in and found our protagonist, Ned, rooting through the wreckage of Coventry Cathedral, looking for a Macguffin.

And I was confused. So confused. See, our story is told entirely in the first person, and at the beginning Ned is suffering from time lag. Time lag is a lot like jet lag, and being easily confused is a symptom. Ned starts spouting poetry and jumping from thought to thought and mishearing characters and bungling plot elements, and as a result I was disoriented.

"Ah-HAH," I thought. "That's just what she wants me to feel. The game's afoot." I read the rest of the book in either gleeful collaboration with or active defiance of her authorial intent. As Ned gets more facts, I the reader get more facts. As Ned is hilariously beset by hilarious Victorian antics, I snicker and chortle in response. And as he sets out to solve the semi-fair-play mystery, I play along at home, cataloguing clues, advancing theories, eliminating the impossible and allowing for whatever remains, however improbable.

It was a delight to read, and I look forward to the day when somebody publishes an annotated edition which resolves each of the manifold literary quotes, references, and allusions.