I'm a little ambivalent about this one. I'm not sure I'm going to finish the series, but if I do, it'll be after a bit of a break.

It started out well and I really liked it in the beginning, although I was constantly a little thrown by Meggie basically calling her father by name. It raised a lot of plot-related questions quite quickly which made me curious. Chapters are often fairly short, so I felt like I was racing through it.

Then after the first third or so, it started getting to be a bit more of a struggle. The plot felt slow and meandering even though at this point there had a lot of interaction with the Bad Guys and running away from danger and stuff. It feels like it could have been tightened up here. No further plot questions raised, not much in the way of hints or things the characters find out.

I think I'm basically bothered by Capricorn, really. He feels like a caricature. I get that he's the evil dude and all, but I don't know why? The reader isn't given the slightest hint of his motivation or background or anything. I'm not asking for all his secrets to be revealed, but I do need something or other. Otherwise he's just a villain being villainous just for the sake of being the villain, and that may well be why the plot feels so pointless. What is he trying to achieve? I get that I'm somewhat out of the target audience for this book, but even so.

It also bothers me that Mo keeps claiming that he doesn't know how his power works, what triggers it, or how to read something specific out of the books, and yet when Meggie discovers she can do it, she seems to be able to do it in a deliberate way, reading a specific character out. When she becomes so excited about being able to do it, I'm quite bothered about how the consequences of doing it doesn't even cause so much as a passing thought. Her own mother disappeared into a book when Capricorn was read out, yet she never stops to wonder what else disappeared into Peter Pan when Tinkerbell came out. I know she's just a child and children aren't always entirely aware of action and consequence, but her own mother! You would think that would have left an impression. It seems a weird power to be excited about having, really. Sounds more like something of a curse to me. And at no point does anybody seem at all interested in trying to work out why or what exactly this magic is and how to utilises it usefully and safely.

Towards the end, it started picking up again. At last something new happened, another hint at something, something to keep the reader interested. At this point it was pretty much the only mystery left apart from 'why is Capricorn so evil?' and 'how will we reach the conclusion', but the clues were quite blatant and the confirmation came soon thereafter, so that didn't last long.

I found throughout the book my interest waxed and waned with the emergence of plot points until I was close enough to the end that the thought of being nearly finished accounted for most of my interest.

It's not a bad book by any means, and large parts of it was very enjoyable. I liked the character of Elinor almost immediately. She's not really written in a way where she's meant to be particularly likable, but aspects of her character resonated with me.