Finished: We Have Always Lived In A Castle (Jackson) Eighteen year old Mary Katherine (Merricat) to her family, her twenty-something sister, Constance, and their Uncle Julian live in Blackwood, one of the old family estates in a small village. Six  years earlier the Blackwoods were one of the rich, upper echelon of the village with a massive estate and prestige. Until, one night the entire family was poisoned at dinner...the father, the mother, the aunt, the uncle and the 10 year old brother. The entire family died of arsenic poisoning, except for Uncle Julian, who didn't get enough of the poison, eldest daughter Constance, who cooked all the meals for the family and 12 year old Merricat, who'd been sent to bed without dinner for acting up. Six years later Merricat and Constance are town pariahs. Constance had been immediately arrested and tried, but found innocent of killing her family. Even though found innocent, though, the people of the village were all convinced she'd done it. Constance remained a recluse at home, her only joys working in her vast garden and cooking all the meals for their now small family of three. This left Merricat to walk into town once a week for the groceries and errands where she was mercilessly bullied by the children AND the adults of the town. It's truly very shameful the way all the adults treat her and other adults just laugh. No one stickes up for her. Merricat bravely makes this trip every week so that Constance doesn't have to go and face anyone in town. Merricat is very strange, with a wild imagination, beliefs that she can protect the boundaries of their home by burying different things in the ground, and she's very attached to Constance. When a cousin, Charles, comes knocking on the door, their very structured, odd existence is thrown completely out of whack, with dire consequences. And, we find out who poisoned the family. This was such an eerie book, but I couldn't put it down. I had to keep reading to see what would happen next, and when it was over, I wanted to know the backstory of what led up to the poisoning!!