I try to start reviews from the bottom up, by that I mean giving it stars as I go through my own personal criteria. This is probably the reason I almost never give a book under 3 stars, I don't finish books I hate reading (I might want to rethink my personal rating system because of this as I'm not a book critic so it doesn't really matter).

The plot and pacing of this book are adequate. It's a well written tale, with a few cliches and character tropes that sort of nagged at me throughout. Yesterday, though, I realized it was a four star because I kept on bitching to my wife about different characters.

It didn't matter that the story wasn't the most engaging, all of these characters had become so real to me throughout that I was wishing I could sit them down and talk to some of them. Others I was just slagging off to my wife, and quite a few I was just idly bitching about. It was fantastic, and few others besides Stephen King can get me feeling so much about characters written on a page that could exist in my life but luckily don't. That was enough to turn this 2-3 star "okay" story into a 4 star character driven bitch fest (on my part), that had a largely satisfying ending.