Four children, siblings, visit a woman who tells them the date that they will die. This book is about how they deal with that knowledge and basically leaves the reader asking, is it better to know? Is it possible to live with that knowledge and not let it change you?

It was interesting to read a story that had threads of Judaism throughout. It's not something I'm exposed to very often and it was interesting to see how it informed all four of the Gold siblings lives even though none of them were religious. It was just another way in which they all had the same start and turned it into different paths.

I liked the way that the story follows each of the siblings in turn, letting you watch their fate (or is it really all just choice?) unfold.

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Simon's story broke my heart, though as a character he made me really angry because of how he treated Robert. Klara's story fell totally flat for me because I just did not believe that someone with that much life would take her own. Daniel's story was aggravating for the same reason; he seemed too level-headed to go off half-cocked after the fortune teller. I was happy his wife moved on; she deserved better. Varya's story was also heart-breaking, though I liked that she didn't die at the end. I felt like she was finally free from worrying about it, and so it didn't matter if she died on the predicted day or not.

I really liked all the elements of this book, but somehow I just never connected emotionally to any of the characters. And the lack of clarity about the origin of the Godstones was frustrating.

The synopsis led me to believe this was a thriller-style book about a guy who writes a paper-mail-based game and how two kids get way too deep into the game. Unfortunately, the two kids were incidental to the larger narrative, and the book was actually about Sean. This could have been okay except Sean is really boring and I just didn't care about his past or his family, and even the final scene which felt like it should have been the final reveal of his emotional state was flat and unsatisfying.

This is a hard book to review because while it's really, very good I also didn't enjoy myself at all. This book is a tension headache from start to finish. The interludes, which are fun forays into the history of Locke and the town itself, should have served as some sort of mental cushion, but instead only upped my stress level in nearly every instance.

I love the world. I love the many gods and the triple moons and the horrifying devil sharks and the people's complete acceptance that much of their buildings and technology came from a race that they cannot find any trace of and just call the Eldren. (I didn't like the inexcusable lack of female main characters.) I love Locke and Father Chains and all the Gentleman Bastards.

In short, this book makes the plot of Ocean's Eleven seem about as involved as boiling an egg.

Sherlock is meant to be smart and Moriarty even more so, and yet these are two of the most unintelligent protagonists I've ever encountered. Introducing Sherlock as a mastermind of bizarre chemistry experiments and Moriarty as having an eidetic memory does not make them clever.

There are so many dropped plot threads that could have fleshed out this lackluster story -- the engimatic Mycroft, Sherlock's sickly mother whom you never actually get to meet, Mori's mother, and so on.

I was excited to read about a Moriarty who outsmarts Sherlock and becomes his evil nemesis, but what I got instead was a whiny teenager who suddenly realizes that she is running out of pages to have any actual character development, so it must be time to suddenly plan a murder. Unsurprisingly, it didn't work.

I liked this one a lot better than the first one, but it's hard to feel a lot of suspense when I, a chronically terrible story-figure-out-er was able to figure out the villain, and most of the tension revolves around Mori potentially going to jail despite the fact that the police never once offer up a motive for her to be a murderer. But if you can forgive this book for being poorly plotted and stupid, you will probably be able to enjoy Mori's slow decline into madness and evil-villain-ness.

Like a bad Saturday night scifi channel movie, I got into this in spite of myself. It's poorly written, poorly plotted, and totally outrageous. But the conclusion was fun, and I like that it was like a prequel to the story of Sherlock and Moriarty's rivalry.

I don't know how I feel about this book. I loved the vast majority of it. It was light-hearted and clever and weird and fun. But then the ending just came out of nowhere like a hungry shark on a sun-sparkled beach. I JUST HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS.

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I just keep wondering, did Larry ever even exist at all?

Cargill is a master. Not only did he make me care about robots in Sea of Rust, he wrote a fairy book that is actually AWESOME. I love fairies but usually hate fairy books because they fall flat. Cargill has built a world with angels and the devil and every kind of seelie and unseelie creature and it seems like it shouldn't work but it does. I love the way he writes his characters, and his style is a seamless mix of highlight-able nuggets and dark humor and blood.