There are books I love on a primally emotional level (The Road, The Passage, A Wrinkle In Time, A Man on the Moon), and there are books I am enormously happy to have had the opportunity to read because they were so good, like this one, even though I never developed that emotional connection. It's not the author's fault, right? You can't set out trying to write a book people will love deeply in their souls, what an incredibly amorphous target, and what hubris that would take. This is a great book. I'm not liking its sequel much.