The Book of Accidents by Chuck Wendig

 

This was a hard book to really get into, in the sense that I kept almost putting it down in the first half-ish--the characters weren't working for me and what was going on wasn't, either--but it came together, eventually. The characters started feeling as though they were behaving like people, and what was going on clarified, the stakes were revealed and named. In the Afterword, Wendig talks about the difficulties he had writing this novel, and all the drafts that might still be buried in it: That might be part of at least where the issues I had to start with came from.