Sophie takes her cracked laptop, where her unfinished doctoral thesis resides, with her to Almeria, Spain. She has a Master's degree in Anthropology so everything she sees and does is filtered through that lens.
Sophie studies everything, including her mother, who is ill and looking for a cure at the Gomez clinic in Spain.
More than once someone hints that Rose's illness is psychosomatic and that she had entrapped Sophie in her own destructive fantasies.
Levy does a great job of making Sophie, who is at war with herself, accessible and likable. Though she is 25, Sophie remains child-like and dependent upon her mother. When she meets the irrepressible Ingrid Bauer, however, things begins to shift.
Ingrid is everything Sophie is not; she's bold and selfish. She carries a secret that changes Sophie's view of her.
Sophie has been abandoned by her father at five, but it one climatic moment Sophie abandons her mother.
This is a novel for reader's who like psychological, character-driven novels.
One question. Why is it called Hot Milk?
Jack and Jill's backstory, hinted at in Every Heat a Doorway, gets fully realized in Down Among the Sticks and Bones.
Their parents, Chester and Serena Wolcott, had children for the most selfish of reasons. When the twins weren't what they expected, Chester assigned them stifling gender roles. One of them he dresses as a tomboy, Jill, while the other, Jacqueline, he dresses in finery.
Unsurprisingly, what their father does has disastrous effects. When they reach the Moors, they reverse roles; Jack becomes self-sufficient and skilled in the sciences while Jill becomes the vain daughter of a vampire.
This is the 2nd part of the Wayward children series. Though it lacks the spark of the first part, it offers a wonderful depiction of the Moors.
