Do you like fable-like books centring women and engaging with the mysterious and the eerie? You're in the right place. Rarely do I come across books as singular as this one - you are either going to really like it, because it is offering exactly what you think it would offer, or you are going to struggle to get through it. The lush, sometimes overtly so, prose is used to tell a multi-generational story of women, alive and dead, whose very being is tied to a crooked house in mountainous Catalonia. Told in a barely consecutive narrative, the story starts as an old woman lay dying, and another one watching over her. All of the women in this house are connected to the matriarch Joana, who made a deal with the devil and managed to trick him, only to be cursed back with a curse following her line generation after generation. As the men of the family keep dying and leaving their women, the women keep surviving, like the harsh plants of the mountains they live among.

Folk stories, witches, devils, Christianity and, of course, the Spanish Civil War, loom large in this book. I connected more with it once it started reflecting and commenting on the real events and the passage of time throughout the 20th century. On the scale of The Boy with the Black Rooster to Pedro Paramo, a novel it is in active conversation with, it is closer to The Boy than the masterpiece levels of Pedro it aims for. For me personally, as not a big fan of this type of book, it landed somewhere just behind Carrion Crow, a recent decent offering by Heather Parry. Sola's novel also, perhaps surprisingly, is in conversation with some of Ali Smith's work, and it did have echoes of the Scottish writer's passion for language. The fable-like storytelling behind this book makes it hard to connect to the characters and the story and see their troubles and concerns as alive and real.

If this is magical realism, there ain't much realism here, but if you like fable-like atmospheric books with a strong sense of place, this is for you. I personally struggled to get through it, but I appreciate the talent and the craft behind this one, it just wasn't for me.