Not as good as everyone would have you believe. I found the characters to be almost entirely unsympathetic, and unlike Emily, I didn’t experience any emotion whatsoever while reading the book. Many of the phrases used to describe Baby’s surroundings were very nice, but that’s about the only thing that made the book worth consuming. Moreover, even those phrases were flawed, since I can’t bring myself to believe that a 12 year old girl would possibly use these beautiful phrases. You might argue that it’s not young Baby thinking those things, but rather old Baby remembering, but I don’t think the tenses were worked out well enough in the book to be able to distinguish what was Baby-then and Baby-later.