Stephen King lite - if you've read IT, there's no need to waste time on this derivative and slow-paced ghost story. A young woman is drawn back to her seaside hometown to reunite with her school friends when she gets a call from her parents: 'He's come back'. Her brother, whose disappearance five years earlier caused the breakdown of the family, has walked back into their lives with no answers about where he's been or what happened to him. Sister Sadie knows the truth, which involves a secluded island and a pair of glowing amber eyes, but is she brave enough to confront the past and admit to her mistakes?

The first half of the book was promising, with a dramatic introduction about another missing child and Sadie's internalised guilt about her family and reluctance to return home. The portrayal of the somnolent seaside town, frozen in time and populated with the same old faces, was well written and probably drawn on the author's location. The plot immediately started to drag, however, and what could have been a good short story was drawn out with repetitive phrases and redundant descriptions - if the characters spent less time crossing their legs or asking 'What does that even mean?', not to mention itemising the process of using a telephone or peeling a potato, then the plot might have moved along at a swifter pace.

The dual timelines of 'what happened to Ben' in 1990 and 'why did Ben come home' in 1995 were also excruciatingly laboured, until I think even the author realised that she needed to speed the story along with a good old historical infodump about the haunting of the island. By that point, I was skim-reading and only paused to roll my eyes at the message of the story: older sisters apparently have a duty to babysit (in the convincing dialogue of the seventeenth century ghost) their younger siblings, and any children who want lives of their own are just plain selfish and deserve to be punished. Or something.

Stiff and repetitive dialogue, sluggish to the point of asytolic pacing, and a constant feeling of literary deja vu - I'm never trusting Instagram book recs again (although at least I didn't have to pay for the honour, thanks to Kindle Unlimited). ( )