If my AP English teacher from high school read one of the inarticulate reviews that I write today, she would be appalled. Where I could once say something coherent about what was going on in a book, I now tend to just say 'loved it!' or 'not all that good.' My main yardstick for a book is whether it sucks me in. If I open it on Saturday morning, and finish it before falling asleep that Saturday, than it definitely is a very good book. That pull is likely to be a combination of plot and character, plus an interesting setting and graceful language. How exactly that all comes together, I don't analyze very well. That's happened with Cormac McCarthy and Diana Gabaldon, so the topic and style don't have to be at all consistent.[return][return]This book did not suck me in. I started it on a holiday weekend, and didn't finish it until the following Friday. I was never anxious to know what happened next -- and that's in a book with what are clearly intended to be cliffhangers. It gave me the feeling that elements were being carefully assembled for a movie script that would sell: sexy witch-chick, mysteriously androgynous goth, sexual violence, compulsion, pretty blond imperiled and then killed -- check, check, check, check, check![return][return]Perhaps my problem was that the narrator seemed to be an Emo adolescent, and that just doesn't interest me much. I did find the Frances character, and the world, interesting, though the dystopia and utopia are both a bit too pat.