4.75 stars. 

"The only boundary between desire and obsession is time: if you crave someone long enough, it becomes a need. It becomes your ever-waking thought. The only thing you live for."

As a little reminder to you, if you haven't read this book and don't want any spoilers, please, don't read further. I may drop a couple spoilers and I might not be aware of it.

Holy shit. This was a hell of a ride.

I don't even know how to begin to describe the way I feel towards this book. I just read the synopsis and said "why not? it looks interesting", it captivated me since the first moment. I practically devoured this book.

Liv Stay is a single mom of three girls who just moved to Lón Haven, a little Scottish island, to do the job of painting a mural inside of a Lighthouse, the Longing. She needs the money, she's struggling with being a single mom who has lost her husband and is running away from something.

The atmosphere is dark, gloomy and eery. At first, The Longing looks like a normal and abandoned place left to its own, but there are more deep things going on there. I really liked the dark vibes and how the MCs described it all.

 The characters were okay and I don't complain much about them. They were complex and had their own story very well written. I do complain about Rowan, Brodie and Bram tho.

The story is split in various times. Yes, times. We start with Liv in 1998, then with Sapphire in the same year and then we have Luna in 2021. At first, it seems like a mix of the years and the things that are happening, but then we move to the year of 1662 and you begin to understand that the story it's not just about Liv, her struggles and her daughters. It's also about Patrick and Amy. And it's also about women who were tortured and burned and killed by people who thought they were witches, who casted dark spells to curse people and kill them, or to bring the "wildlings" and make bad things happen to the folks of the island.

Liv doesn't believe in those fairy tales of "wildlings" being fae disguised as children with the purpose to wipe out the bloodlines of their families. But as weird shit starts to happen, and mostly when her two daughters go missing, Live starts to wonder if perhaps those tales are true after all. Isla tells her that the only way to prevent that her entire bloodline is wipped out, and her daughters come back safe and sound, Liv has to kill the wildling.

In 2021, Luna, Liv's middle daughter, is a grown up woman, who has made her life —of course, with some traumas and aftermath of her thinking that her mother abandoned her in the woods—, and who also looked for her mother and sisters for so many years, with no real clue of what happened to them. One day, receives a call. They tell her that they found her little sister, Clover. When Luna goes to the hospital where they have Clover, she finds out that her sister did not grow up. Clover is still seven years old. Luna has some blank spaces in her memory of what really happened in the island.

It's here where the story turns interesting —at least, it did for me— and we discover all the layers of the story itself. There's more buried in here than we think. I did have a hard time at the beginning trying to differentiate the mcs perspectives because sometimes it was mixed. Gladly, I made my way through it and I didn't have much more problems, lol.

After a while, we understand that it was not any wildlings, but something with the Longing and like a portal... It was like the tv show, Dark featuring witches and eery vibes. We learn how a rational and logic-minded person can lost their shit when weird or emotional things happen, how that thin line between reality and tales can be crossed in one single step.

I liked Liv and her daughters' story. It was an emotional journey and I shed some tears towards the end of the book —on the last 3 chapters. You can feel her struggles with her illness, raising 3 kids on her own —one of them being a rebel teenager— and trying to protect her family. I liked Saffy, Luna and Clover as well. I felt bad for Saffy after Brodie played with her and tricked her to give him her v-card. Ugh, fucking and disgusting men. Luna grow up as a broken kid, haunted by the ghost of her past and what happened with her mother and sisters and how she tried so bad to get her family again. I wanted to protect Clover at all cost.

Patrick was okay and wasn't at the same time. My guessing is that he did those awful things because Amy put a spell on him, idk. He was in love, he saw his mother being burned and could not do anything to stop it. He traveled through time just to get back to Amy, as he always knew he would.

In overall, this book was fast paced, had really good eery/paranormal/terror elements that transported me to Lon Haven with Liv and her daughters, and with Patrick and Amy, and made me feel very very very sorry for all those women who were hunted and killed for being "witches". It's a story about family, love and folklore and myth that is very well written.

Definitely a comfort book and one of my favorites!