moving under skies

I didn't find this one as entertaining as the other books of Waters' that I've read. After several months of occasional consideration, I think it's because the ending is so ambiguous. Now, ambiguous hauntings are actually my favourite kind--see Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House for a perfect and horrifying example--but this book had such a lengthy amount of buildup that I felt rather cheated to be deprived of the definitive denouement, the gut-punch-twist ending, that I had come to expect based on Fingersmith and Affinity. Had I gone in without prior expectations I might have felt more fulfilled by the book. Or perhaps I read too quickly (it was an all-nighter) and missed out on important clues in one direction or another...Dissatisfaction aside, this was an undoubtedly strong novel from a good writer. I really do love historical novels that play upon the conventions of their time period's literature, and Waters is always quite clever at working within the architecture of the gothic romance.