I dont think I will be adding this book to my list of favorites, but I did enjoy reading it. The story and descriptions are creepy and good and the idea original. Magic and the supernatural are incorporated into the story in a lot of different ways which I really liked. The aunt with a sense of what tattoos to give people, old tarot cards, little charms and strange creatures and overwhelming light...all of these things fitted together really well.

I did wish that the town history had been better explored, perhaps by cutting back on the romance portions of the book. Those parts made me a bit uncomfortable due to the main characters weird aging process. It didnt make sense to me that she would have grown up psychologically at the same rate as everyone else, even with the explanations for this the book gives, and it seemed like a bad move to have a romantic relationship happening. ( )

Not quite what I was expecting, but this book had a great feeling of eerieness and foreboding that carried on throughout. The characters were easy to tell apart and determine how they should interact with one another. My only issue was with Clementine. If she had been "asleep" for that many years, how did she suddenly know how to do everything that others could do without learning how? Most things she had never seen before, but she automatically knew how to do them. That didn't quite make sense to me. ( )

This book was more like 2 stars for me("it's okay"), but due to goodreads's whacked out way of inflating scores I feel bad giving it even a 3, because it's not terrible, it's just vague and not enough.

This book is not bad, it just left me wanting. I wanted more polish, more filling. The impression I was left with as I read was that it was trying for a lyrical sort of "less is more" and somehow managed to leave me with "less is just not quite enough."

Clementine begins the book trapped in a cellar where she has been for years. She is freed and magically accepted immediately by her cousin and magically has knowledge of the town thanks to her years of "dreaming" about the town. Of course, she doesn't know what the Reckoning was even though it was the biggest thing to hit the town, ever. Okay, it's a teen lit book. I get that. Unfortunately this sort of vague finger waving continues and I really just didn't find it well done enough to be truly enjoyable. It jarred me again and again.

She is instantly attracted to Fisher, the cute, popular boy who saved her (hello, YA trope that I will always be tired of.) Okay, fine. Her cousin instantly accepts her, and the town folk, who are supposedly skittish and spooky of magic essentially overlook the fact that she has magically rearrived in a family loudly blamed for the Reckoning. Right. These people who killed and burned, etc. just sort of side eye her and move on. Someone has clearly never been to a racist small town. That's not how small minded bigots work.

Essentially the description of this book reads as though Clementine has a vendetta and is out looking to discover what happened to her. In reality Clementine is a watery creature who hangs out with her cousin, delicately feels bad for everyone and is magically in love with and loved by Fisher. Okay, but I just sort of wanted to shake her. Here is a girl who lived in a cellar, covered by dirt, for years, and her response to everything is a sort of gentle, wafting, "fix-it" with just enough rebellion to keep her from being beyond boring.

Eventually Clementine finds out what the Reckoning is, because she wasn't smart enough to ever sit down and say "somebody tell me what the **** is going on." We as the reader get to see the magic in the town, with very little actual explanation, and I know that slow drift of knowledge is very fun and a good way to set the mood, but in this book it just meant the one truly interesting thing, the Fiends, were essentially just drifting back characters.

We really learn almost nothing about the Fiends, except that they exist, there is literally one sentence that tells us they used to somehow be involved and invited into the town and we are given one bit of foreshadowing that they seem to like Clementine. I'm honestly not 100% sure what Clementine's powers are, unless you consider deus ex machina a power. So, we have these Fiends, who are described in very interesting ways, which I wanted to see actually DO something to show what exactly they were. Nope.

Instead what we have is an ending that made me want to beat my head against a wall. Spoilers!! We eventually drag out of the narrative that there are 5 powerful young people in this town, and due to their proximity they essentially increase the magic and make it want to eat people. Alright, not quite, but that's what's relevant to our staggering plot. We get introduced to 4 of them as a group. The author lets us bond, then tells us that, oh, by the way, unless they can control themselves one of them will have to die because they're just too much. So, what does the person who brings this news do? Does she send her own grandchild off or tell them to leave? Nope, she essentially shrugs and goes on. Bad idea. So, of course, the 5th character who we've barely met, except to know that her father abuses her, is going to be our scapegoat/sacrifice. Long story short. Said character kills her Fiend mother (so why is she not the one who the Fiends like/with power over the Fiends??) and her human father and then the Reckoning starts all over, the town yeehaws ride out with guns and start trying to burn the house of Clementine's cousin, then our 5th character starts flooding the place and there's fighting, blah, blah, blah, and then Clementine magically calls the Fiends (seriously, they could have been so cool if they were better used, but mostly they were too background to be anything but an insert). The Fiends take our 5th character away, things are magically fixed and the yeehaws with guns go home. And then, here's what bugs the shit out of me, despite the fact that the townspeople have no evidence of how things are magically fixed up by Clementine they somehow know it was Clementine who called the Fiends and that's how it got fixed. Much hand waving. The book just needed more. More fiends. More filling in. More common sense. More character development of a handful of background characters who seemed to morph into various shapes/whatever fit the moment.

In the end the book kept my attention, which is more than I can say of many books lately, however, that was mostly a product of it's sheer simplicity vs. it giving me anything like I wanted. I enjoy several other books by this author, so I do not believe it is her style (I love slow, drifting plot lines and world development), but this one just lacked it for me. Disappointed in what I feel like I could have had, vs. disappointed in the book as a whole. ( )

This was not the story I thought it would be. However it was entertaining, and I enjoy it. The characters were fine, none that really grabbed me like I had hoped they would. Overall 4 of 5 stars I would say 3.5 if I had that option. ( )

I was just expecting a fun book. But instead I got a thick plot, interesting characters, and a magic system that was both fun and terrifying. Clementine is a good main character, she is full of hope, she does not stop trying to help those around her, and she wants the truth. The magic system is so weird, fun, and a little scary. Clementine does not really have much power herself but she makes everyone else around her much more powerful than before. The mystery of what happened is very drawing. The Fiends are really the best part, in my opinion. They are like what the original stories about the Fae are. They are more than a human can really understand. The people from New South Bend act the real people would. Something weird is going on, it's their fault. The reckoning at the end of the book is very tense but really great scene. Yovanoff has a good hand with weird moving on scary.

I give this book a Five out of Five stars. I get nothing for my review and I borrowed this book from my local library. ( )