Certainly an odd book, true to its name. Plenty of deliciously bizarre and fantastical things to amaze us! I like the plot well enough, and the characters are interesting and delightful. There's some really marvelous imaginative creations here, but.... Ah, the inevitable BUT... There's too many gross things- boogers and saliva, farts and burps, rancid squid poop, you name it. If it's gross and grody, it's in this book. Yeah, a guy wrote this.

Mostly, I don't like the villains being so horridly demonic. I mean, I can appreciate a good evil villain who gets his just deserts in the end, but this is just going too far. I mean, drinking kitten blood in a satanic ritual? Really? That's just too disgusting to contemplate.

I would not give this book to children to read. It goes beyond the normal range of evil I've come to expect from a good fantasy. It's quite sad too, b/c the author obviously has a wonderful talent for writing. And he ruins it with scary subject material. I found it disturbing and upsetting to read. Demonic possession is not something I want to read about.
However, after having messaged back and forth with the author... I feel a little better about his approach to the demonic material. He doesn't approach it flippantly, I think.

So I excuse it, since the rest of the book is so delightful.
He uses such vivid vocabulary! I got lost in the words. The writing is quite superb really. So read it if you must, but don't get bogged down in the ickiness.