Spirit Street Revisited

This book took up the lion's share of the year and, more than anything, it defines the year. Maybe it defines my entire existence in Birmingham (where I've lived since 2023). This very Victorian book (although set in the present-day) gothic, paranoid, haunted, suspicious of everything. This book, reading it back, is like a very dark, pitch-black version of Peter Pan, this murdered girl brought to another land by a vain, self-obsessed Peter, who dazzles her and then, eventually, is revealed to be a fraud.

In a way, my being in Birmingham has kind of been revealed to be a fraud; now I've been absorbed into this harsh bureaucratic web, not entirely unlike that of the university I was so desperate to flee. Hence the unhappy, melancholy wistful nature of the book, upset with modern life. Still, our heroine gets a happy ending.