We are not just made of blood and bone – we are made of stories. Some of us have our stories told for us, others write their own – you wrote yours. [loc. 4542]
The story begins in 1998, when artist Olivia Stay arrives on the Scottish island of Lòn Haven, where she's been commissioned to paint a mural in a disused lighthouse. With Olivia are her three daughters: Sapphire, aged fifteen; Luna, aged nine; and Clover, aged seven. Sapphire -- Saffy -- is not best pleased to have been uprooted from her life and her friends: searching for distraction, she finds an old book and begins to read about witches and changelings and missing children. All the locals seem to be highly superstitious, and Saffy is scornful of their fears -- though it's true that a lot of children go missing from Lòn Haven. And then Clover disappears...
The second main narrative of the novel begins in 2021 (sans Covid), with Luna expecting her first child. Since she was abandoned in the forest by her mother as a child, she's grown up in a series of foster homes, which have left her with some deep-seated psychological issues and a reluctance to commit to Ethan, the father of her unborn child. Luna is very much alone in the world, and is constantly searching for clues about what happened to her mother and sisters. Then she receives a call from a police station in Scotland. Clover has been found: and, inexplicably, she's still seven years old.
The premise of this novel is intriguing, but I was unable to suspend my disbelief at certain points. Why would the police just hand over a seven-year-old child -- who's apparently the subject of a missing person report from over twenty years ago -- to a woman claiming to be her sister? Why would that seven-year-old child start behaving in deeply spooky ways, which constitute an excellent red herring but have no other explanation? Why would the 'diary' excerpts from a book supposedly written in the seventeenth century have such a modern style? And what's the mechanism by which numbers appear, cut into the skin of returned children?
The atmosphere was great, but I didn't feel the story really hung together: too much of it relied on characters being purposely opaque or deliberately dishonest. There's a subplot about cancer which I could have done without, especially as it had little relation to the main story about witches' curses and missing children. And I didn't warm to any of the characters.
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