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It was okay. It reminded me quite a bit of Wizard's First Rule by Terry Goodkind, only with all the truly violent bits taken out to make it safe for children to read.

And it clearly is a children's book. Not my cup of tea anymore, but it definitely has the feel of those old adventure stories I would've read when I was 10 or 11 years old. So if you've got kids in that age group, I'm sure they'll enjoy it.

The writing is a bit simplistic (read: modern) for the genre, but again, that makes sense because it's a children's story. There's quite a bit of "thinking of himself" and "nodded his head", which are unfortunately two of my redundancy bugbears. It also contains the dreaded "alright" (I hate that word)...

But I'm being overly pedantic. For a preteen or young teen who likes fantasy, I think it'd be perfect!

That was really good!

The pacing is perfect, the twists are good enough that I almost saw them coming, and the story is riveting.

It's about a woman with strange birthmarks and stranger dreams, and I kept reading to find out what would happen next.

Everything that happens makes perfect sense, and I totally identify with the main character. Everything she does in response to what happens to her is exactly what I can imagine myself doing.

No spoilers, but aother thing I enjoyed about it is that one of the main characters (not the MC) is a prostitute, and the author writes her as a normal human being. So many times in books and TV shows, sex workers are either vilified, or they're portrayed as women desperately trying to feed their children or eke out a living, or they're drug addicts.

This woman is none of those things. She's not crazy about doing what she does, and she wouldn't mind getting out of the business, but she also treats it as a fairly normal, respectable job. Not that we see too much detail of her "gigs", and it's not as if the book is erotica (far from it), but I appreciated the fact that she's just a regular person who happens to occasionally sleep with men for money, and while it's not her favourite part of her life, she doesn't hate herself for it either. It's refreshing.

This is one of those books that grabs you from the first line, and doesn't let you go until the end.

Unfortunately, I don't have as much time to read as I once did, so I found myself frequently having to put this book down, sometimes not picking it up again until days later. But as is the mark of a fantastic book, I can tell you that every time I picked it up again, no matter how long it had been, I was right back into it!

It's got an epic feel to it. A real coming-of-age story. When we first meet Margo, she's in her mid-teens and living with her mother, and by the end, she's in her early twenties at least. She's not the most stable person, but every decision she makes, everything she does, makes perfect sense in the context of the story. Everything just... fits.

There are a couple of lose ends, but they also somehow make sense to be there. You're left to make up your own mind about what happens.

It's sad, it's twisted, it's a little sick (but not too bad), and it's deeply psychological. If you like that sort of thing, I definitely think you should give this book a read.

I found myself being reminded of Jeff Linday's Dexter. Maybe you will too.