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Intense, haunting, and beautiful. This is a tightly drawn story of family, mental illness, and small-town aspirations.

At first I felt something lacking in the plot, as it really only involves one family with almost no outside characters, no secondary plotline. No friends, no school drama, no town events. Because of this the family seems to exist in a vacuum, and while it was frustrating to have a story so closed in, I do see how it intensifies the emotion of the book all the more.

The prose strikes the balance between raw and magical. The dread and horror of one sibling's very real descent into mental illness is contrasted beautifully with the other sibling's innocent, mythological view of his sister. Most of the language is stripped down in a way that reflects the starkness of the West Texas desert, but every once in a while, a line like "I suddenly wondered if this was what Abilene's world was like: her head filled with her very own stars; captivating at first, but finally terrifying when she realized that everything else that was light had gone dark." A few lines like that are sprinkled in at the perfect moment to hit that emotional chord.

While mental illness takes up so much space in the pages, ultimately this book is a stunning portrait of sibling devotion. I loved it.