Anastasia McCrumpet is not having a great first day of school. It gets even worse when she is pulled from class and sent off with her great-aunts Prim and Prue who she has never met. She is told her parents where in a vacuum cleaner accident and she is now going to live with the aunts at their classic Victorian asylum. Anastasia finds herself locked in a dreary room at night where she has to use a chamber pot and doing chores like collecting leeches during the day. Who are these aunts? Why do they live in an old asylum? Why do they collect pictures of missing kids? 

This was a super quirky read and by that I mean just a bit too over the top. It has aspects of Roald Dahl and Lemony Snicket but is not as well done. There is a supernatural element that comes in towards the end of the book that really seemed tagged on. I think it would have worked better if incorporated earlier in the book. There is also Anastasia herself who just seems to go along with things for entirely too long. I really wanted to like this more than I did.