** spoiler alert ** Strong start, seemed quirky, I really liked Lucia as narrator, and the bond between siblings was well established and felt natural, but in the end, the plot really didn't hold up for me. I don't understand how they didn't run into Casper, their father, until the end of the book if he was supposed to have been at Kneebone Castle the whole time. And why do I care about Haddie? And why does she have their mother's name if she isn't their mother? A plot based on a single lie (your mother is in an institution), is always pretty weak because after they've uttered that single truth-revealing sentence there's nothing left to do but end the book and wonder why dad didn't just tell the truth in the first place. And finally, while I liked that Lucia was our "mystery" narrator (her asides were for the most part humorous), I didn't like it when she said things like "and then this really scary thing happened but I don't want to talk about it because it was so scary"... I want to hear the scary part. Constantly talking about omissions kept me bored.

Between this and Olivia Kidney, it seems Ellen Potter is very interested in tackling the truly dark in her children's fiction (an insane, institutionalized parent, abandonment, death/suicide of a sibling... things that actually happen to actual families), and I appreciate her effort. Her approach, however, hasn't worked for me in either case.