Ilia itibaren Lower Heyford itibaren Lower Heyford

Gideon is a new character for the writing team. He's incredibly intelligent, self-destructive, and sincerely broken. I had one fist-pump moment when some much-beloved characters made a guest appearance in this shared-world book and the rest of the book left me kind of 'eh.' I didn't love it. I didn't hate it. It delivered exactly what I wanted from it so in that it succeeded but it wasn't as fun for me as many of their other works.

I rolled eyes for a while here, but was sucked in eventually. As girl-narrator goes through her issues (weight) and her brother's (date rape) and her parents' (cluelessness), you get it, and her choices. Handled some subtle stuff for girls: how damaging father's complements can be, however well-meaning. "You've really lost weight!" he muses, and she says something like, "you know what dad? I'm going to tell you that in this family we're not going to talk about my body anymore." It's maturity that I haven't managed to muster as a grownup, and therefore is unlikely, but shoot, I'd like adolescent girls to have her in their heads, so that's something.

I went back and forth between 3 and 4 stars for this one but finally decided on 3 for 2 reasons. #1. - I had a hard time getting into it at the beginning and #2. Unlike other books from this author (Daughter of the Forest and Son of the Shadows, etc.) where I soaked in every detail and practically felt as if I were living in the story, in this one I found my self skipping through the details to get to the end. I did enjoy the story though and am excited to read the next books in the trilogy.