Count me among those suckered-in by that amazing, creepy baby-basket cover.

The writing was flat, but relatively painless. I am not the target audience so I tried to be forgiving of plot holes and inconsistencies. I was less forgiving of the wildly disparate pop culture references that were more distracting than enlightening.

My biggest disappointment is the unevenness of the writing. Early on, Yovanoff quietly incorporates a few lines of dialogue to raise big questions about the nature of things. In later scenes she heavyhandidly attempts to address them. But in the end she neither provides answers nor leaves the reader in a satisfying state of contemplation.

Take Neil Gaiman and Steven King's old daydreams, toss in ageless tales of gods and fairies and good and evil, then bake it all up and frost it with sibling rivalry and teenage angst...what you get is a reasonably tasty but familiar confection, and when it's gone you have doubts that it was worth all the calories.


( )

Interesting concept...but fell flat :/ ( )

Just ok tale of a city where every so often the fairies take a child and leave a replacement. Maybe a readalike for fans of Tithe or Wicked Lovely. ( )

This book is beautiful. There's no other way to describe it. And as I currently feel incredibly dull with words, I'll just quote Maggie Stiefvater and say it's "an eerie and beautiful story if ugly things, that should be read aloud after dark, at a whisper."

It's a story about coming to terms with your origins, about building your own story, executed in the most loving, magical way.

"This was love. All my life, I'd been so convinced I was beyond it, outside it, but this was love -had been all along- and now I knew it." ( )

I try to express only my most honest opinion in a spoiler-free way. Unfortunately, there is still always a risk of slight spoilers despite my best efforts. If you feel something in my review is a spoiler please let me know. Thank you.

I enjoyed this book. It was a nice twist, coming from the point of view of the 'changeling' or whatever they are. It was nice story with an interesting hero. In the end, it was pretty predictable, but I liked it enough to want to read more by this author. ( )