Nothing hurts quite like giving three stars to a five star prediction. This is far from a bad book, but the blurb sells it as a ghostly love story which really sets the reader up with false expectations. Yes, Blanca falls in love with George, but that is not what the book is "about." I was anticipating a literary meditation on love and longing and wanting desperately what you cannot have. I was anticipating great atmosphere, tension, yearning. Basically I was anticipating and wanting something that this book simply is not. And it's fine that it's not that, I just wish the blurb did a better job of conveying the kind of novel this actually is, which is essentially a series of vignettes about various characters, with Blanca (the ghost) as our voyeuristic narrator. Unfortunately that's a style that is more miss than hit for me anyway, but I also think that Stevens failed to tie these vignettes together to create a cohesive theme or point. There were quite a few moments where her writing shone, but I never quite felt as though she'd really created a world for me to step into, nor was I given much of a reason to care about the characters whose lives we were catching glimpses of.

If you like books that hop around between characters and timelines, this is probably worth a read. It is well-written and at times insightful. But if you're interested in this because you're expecting a tense sapphic love story please save yourself the time and read a Sarah Waters book instead.