2.5 stars
This was a strange book. Quiet and dark, it felt like the shadow of a story. The plot was pretty straightforward, and the characters didn't have much feel to them. Perhaps if it was a 100 or so pages longer, I could have actually felt something while reading it? Because there is nothing remarkable about the story. The 3rd person, present tense prose feels dreary and monotonous, the characters have no life to them, and plot has no proper conclusion or direction. It all feels rushed and insubstantial. More a dream than a tangible story. It seemed to me that Schwab simply had the aesthetics of the book down, and decided to go ahead and fit a plot to it without developing it any further. A shame, because there was a lot of potential to the story.