This is the opening paragraph of the book and it’s all you need to know about what is going to happen, about what is happening, about what has happened. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death- cup mushroom. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. The last time I felt it was reading Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle. But sometimes, the wonder is still there. I think it’s one of the reasons I read so much fantasy and science fiction these days, as these genres provide a short-cut to that feeling of difference. It gets more and more difficult to feel the same overwhelming, heady excitement about books that I used to. You know the type: precocious, slightly awkward, unseen by boys, always, everywhere reading – hungry for something different, other places, other lives. As long as I can remember, I have been one of the Reading Girls. One of my first memories of myself is me reading on the veranda at my grandparents’ place – I must have been four, possibly five.
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