I wasn't quite sure whether to rate this four or five stars. It has some really great elements in it, but has just enough shortcomings to keep it from being great overall. Certainly Phillips has come up with a creepy, mind-twisting scenario, and she is terrific at ramping up the tension. She also does a fantastic job conveying the ambivalence of motherhood: loving your kids, but also really needing a break from them, even resenting their constant demands. Here's Molly with a PhD in paleobotany, yet she spends her evenings and weekends cutting up grapes and wiping up various bodily excretions. The stress, trauma, drudgery and transcendence of motherhood - and I do mean motherhood, not parenthood. This is gendered parenting. Very well done.

She also does a mostly good job of keeping it ambiguous whether Moll is indeed a doppelganger Molly from an alternate universe or whether she is some kind of hallucination from Molly's fatigue and stress.

However.

I think this aspect falls short. It is entirely possible to do a truly ambiguous story that can be interpreted multiple ways -- looking at you, Daphne du Maurier's "My Cousin Rachel." But here Phillips just falls short. What kept tripping me up is those weird artifacts that were found in the Pit. If you truly wanted to keep it ambiguous, then Molly should have hidden the artifacts, not shown them to anyone. That way the reader could question whether those artifacts exist at all. But everyone knows about the artifacts. So that implies that Moll is indeed real. In fact, the more I think about it, the more apparent holes there are. After all, if the Bible with feminine pronouns for God is what prompted the suicide bombing, then why did it happen in Moll's universe and not Molly's? Presumably the artifacts come from Moll's universe. So in her universe, was there a Bible with masculine pronouns that prompted the suicide bomber?

And since Moll came from the slightly off universe, I kept expecting something slightly off with her. Like maybe she is left-handed while Molly is right-handed. Or her noticing something else different between their two universes -- but she never did. So that makes it seem more like she's a hallucination -- except that other people saw the artifacts. At this point we have moved beyond ambiguity to confusion and loose ends.

If Molly had hidden the artifacts, and if the kids had been killed not by a suicide bomber but perhaps in a car accident, then I think Moll's existence would have been truly ambiguous and left up to the reader to decide. But as it is, I think Phillips doesn't quite pull it off. It has great elements, but is not a truly great book. Instead, it's a very good book - which is still quite impressive. ( )

I picked this up because Laura van den Berg compared it to her excellent book The Third Hotel. Initially, I had my doubts, and when I encountered the big reveal early on I was tempted to set it aside. However, I continued reading and it just kept getting better and better. I highly recommend it. ( )

Wild, unsettling, gorgeously written litfic as horror as domestic sci-fi.

How can you be in two places at once when you’re not anywhere at all? ( )

The book started amazingly and had me quickly turning the pages, but then it fizzled into nothingness. At first I wondered if it was horror, fantasy, or science fiction, and I was thinking I had landed on a fantastic piece of fiction, but then it turned out to be pretty much a dud. I don't know what it was, honestly. ( )

Hard to follow, well written book that has confusion, laughter and uhhhh.

It grabbed my interest from the beginning but lost me as the story kept on. I get it. But wouldn’t reread it. Little girl is a hoot though. ( )