I was immediately entranced by this beautifully written YA tale bursting with ghostly imagery and intriguing characters and woven with threads of magic and mystery into an intensely vivid portrayal of love and non-negotiable sibling loyalty. 

The story is narrated by the extraordinariy submissive teenager Chloe, raised almost soley by her hypnotic older sister Ruby in lieu of absentee parents and whose descriptions of Ruby’s eerie and charismatic influence over the local townsfolk and fascination with the drowned town of Olive, reveal a disquieting landscape of secrets, gossip and extraordinary occurrences.

The reservoir created by the flooding of Olive is a character in itself and sets the scene for the novel’s pivotal event, when during a drunken party, Chloe, obeying Ruby's command to swim across the reservoir, encounters a drifting rowboat holding the dead body of a fellow schoolmate, London.  

After several years of enforced separation Chloe is eventually lured back to a world where Ruby still has an eerie influence on the townsfolk, where reality is deeply distorted and most significantly, where London appears to be mysteriously alive and well amongst her friends and family.

In order to explain this bizarre situation, the novel takes numerous twists and turns. Whilst the inferrence that Ruby is implicated in the alleged tragedy had me assuming that an elaborate but twisted psychological explanation would be revealed, on the contrary, other numerous conflicting elements are introduced, mostly of a paranormal variety.

By the end of the novel, despite dogged perseverance I was disappointingly unable to determine which explanation prevailed.