As we learn that our nameless narrator has fled London and her previous job at a private girls’ school in mysterious circumstances, we begin to wonder what made her sixth-form class of fresh, young girls fall down “like petals from a rose”. Who was the victim of this mass fainting? The seasoned teacher grown bitter as love turned sour, or the smirking teenage girl with a “high, light silver” laugh? We have an unnamed narrator; a woman whose teaching career came to an end after a seemingly innocuo

Moving into a cottage on the remote estate of Hare House, she begins to explore her new home - a patchwork of hills, moorland and forest. The main character was untrustworthy and didn’t seem like the right narrator for this story. Her, and the rest of the characters were, for me, a little too predictable, too much like cookie-cutter characters. I didn’t find the story as tense or as thrilling or as spooky as I thought it would be, and I felt it was almost a bit too timid and conservative for me. And the language! The writing! Crisp as fresh snow, sharp as broken glass, not a sentence wasted, not a word out of place. I loved the increasing unreliability that our narrator demonstrated – despite her apparent objectivity, she seems to admit a certain ‘fluid’ relationship with the truth vacillating between conscious deception, possible self-deception and a disconnect with the reality around her. To what extent is she victim or villain? Witch or bewitched? Since 1994 I have worked for the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in the IT department, developing databases to support its scientific work. In 2001 I took a two year sabbatical from Kew to work in Eswatini (then Swaziland) as a volunteer with Skillshare International.Hinchcliffe writes atmospherically . . . Fans of the supernatural will find much to enjoy in this eerie tale * Literary Review * There is also an unreliable narrator, a single woman, approaching middle age, who has left teaching following an “incident”, some “mass hysteria” in the classroom. The reader learns more about this as the novel develops. She now does online work, writing essays and papers for people.

Sally was born in London in 1969 but says she “grew up all over the world” as her father served the Foreign Office in New York, Kuwait, Tanzania, Dubai, Zambia and Jordan.So the positives first- it's decently written and the prose helps the story flow. Hinchcliffe isn't too flowery and keeps it moving.