I will admit, the gorgeous cover and the plot description that seems to combine aspects of Jeffrey Eugenides's 'The Virgin Suicides' with a bit of a mystery and a New Mexico frame story initially drew me to this book. And I did enjoy the opening and the meditative elements of the writing style in the frame story. There were elements of the 'core' story that didn't quite work for me and seemed slower and more elegiac than I would've preferred, but overall the arc of the narrative was fairly effective despite these lulls. I do wish there were more development of all of the sisters, or at least MORE of the sisters than we really get, and things were held at a distance in a way that made the novel a bit unsatisfying by the end. I guess this does work with the comparisons to 'The Virgin Suicides,' since those girls were also at a distance from the readers, but with the narrator being one of the sisters, I had hoped for more access.