It was such fun seeing Craig return to this world, and I loved that while the background of Salt and Sorrows informed the story, this works well as a standalone, and my fears about not recalling enough from the first book were swiftly erased as the youngest Thalmus sister is swept off to a new land with a new cast of characters and a new literary-inspired narrative to follow, this time drawing on The Island of Dr. Moreau (among others, though this felt most central to me). We swap satin slippers and tempestuous sea imagery for shadowed gardens and gruesome plant imagery. Craig cleverly plants (no pun intended) a host of reasons her heroine can't completely trust what she's experiencing. Drugs. Dreams. Divine intervention. An ability to speak with ghosts that blurs the lines between the living and the dead. And a few other twists I won't give away here. Once the heroine--and the reader--are left without any firm footing, a suspenseful mystery unfolds. What's really going on in the house of roots and ruin? Can the heroine trust anyone at all? Or should she run for her life before she's trapped in the house and the family, a pawn in a nefarious plot that involves a lot of shady dealings and more than one villain to unmask? Full of her trademark sense of lush atmosphere and eerie imagery, Craig delivers an engaging story about botanical mysteries, ghosts and gods, a family that's rotten to the core, and the perils of unchecked experimentation.