They observe the world, gain experience in it, make friends, feud with their mothers, and get on with their lives as you and I might: not with ambition, and not necessarily without. Haunted Houses is about the past within the present, the inescapability of private memory and public history.

It didn’t occur to Emily that Nina and Anna loved each other, even though they were unhappy and sometimes hated each other. Tillman charts the girls' unsteady drift into womanhood, revealing the multiple forms of inheritance - family, gender, culture - that a girl must swallow or rebel against.And it's like an album that everyone should have in their collection – one of those records they say "launched a thousand bands". When Haunted Houses came out to little fanfare (“I think there was one positive review”) Tillman decided to make peace with the fact she was never going to be a bestseller.

I loved this book and its characters, the novel follows 3 women from early puberty into adulthood each separated from each other completely with no overlap in stories, each chapter being a pattern of one after the other. Grace believes her dolls come alive at night and talk against her, and has a mother who likes animals more than people.From narrating the characters’ lives from a young age, she effectively showed their development from childhood to adult life and created relationships with the readers, strengthening feelings of admiration and empathy, or, conversely, distaste and antipathy.