Here's the thing. I loved all of the creative writing classes I took at OSU, but they left me unable to enjoy the simple pleasure of reading a story without critiquing the writing, even a children's story such as this one. The entire book felt like a blue print to what could be a really fun story with some more work. I loved the way it started--a little house on the prairie girl who could fly!--but then it all fell apart. The characters were flat and the writing was so wordy. Take this for example:

"...Piper was given less than four seconds to retroactively relive all of her last months in a staggering journey that reordered by 180 degrees everything she'd accepted as real and true to be fake and lies, so that her head was spinning and her knees were shaking and she no longer knew which way was up or down."

How did such a sentence get past an editor? Really? And I also had a hard time finding the story plausible. X-Men somehow manages to pull you into the mutant world without it feeling as contrived as this one.

However, I do hope they turn this into a movie, because I think this may be one of those exceptions when the movie could outshine the book. The story has huge potential if put in the right hands.