Points to Lockhart for making you feel sorry for the narrator right off the bat. She’s a poor little rich girl, but her inner pain is vividly portrayed as physical: imaginary knives sink into her skin, objects cleave open her brain, and as blood and viscera pour over her clothes her mother tells her to stand straight and look calm… so she pulls herself together, and does as she is told. As the book goes on, it’s hard to distinguish reality from internal metaphor, but as the clues pile up you begin to understand the origins of her mental disturbance, as well as the ghosts that haunt her wealthy family. The writing style was full of sentence fragments and occasional mid-sentence line breaks; it could have been awkward, but settled quite nicely into the rhythm of stream-of-consciousness narration. Pretty bravely experimental for YA, all things considered.