A teenage girl, a man who drinks, and a talking house cat live in a boarded-up house at the edge of the wild Washington woods. An unspeakable secret binds them together, but when a new neighbor moves in next door, what is buried out among the birch trees may come back to haunt them all. With a totally unreliable narrator, this book was hard to get into and I thought about bailing but decided to hang in until the very end.