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Jul 03, 2014JCLChrisK rated this title 3 out of 5 stars
My feelings about this book are a bit conflicted. On the one hand, it was engaging, exciting, and compelling. Vega is an unusual and strong protagonist that I couldn't help but care about and root for. Wormwood is a mysterious setting and I couldn't help but want to know the answers to its mysteries. There is good action and suspense, along with a sense of wonder and discovery. And it's stuck with me even as I've moved on to other books. On the other hand, I was bothered from the start by a vague inability to fully suspend my disbelief, and the feeling only grew the further I read.* I wanted to question the very foundations of the character and her world as false, and the main thing that kept me reading was curiosity to see if the revelation of answers about Wormwood's mysteries would make it all fit into place. Unfortunately, the book ends without those answers, so I'm left with the feeling as part of my assessment. So, in the end, there are many things about this book that make me want to recommend it mingled with a big reservation that was never addressed. I'm sure this is the start of a series, so I'll have to see when the time comes if my desire for answers is stronger than my frustration with not having them. <SPOILER> *At the start, I had trouble buying that the extent of Vega's world was Wormwood and the Quag, because her worldview seemed to encompass so much more. She had concepts, perspectives, and attitudes that were simply out of place and made no sense if Wormwood was all she knew. As the story progressed, magical things started happening; inexplicable, out-of-the-blue things like her seemingly hallucinatory adventures at Stacks and the nearly unlimited magic that she and Morrigone develop, or the way people seem to just evaporate when they have their "Events." I didn't really buy this as a logically developed system of "magic," but could see the whole thing as some fully immersive virtual-reality existence along the lines of The Matrix--it could explain everything (Vega's climactic bout with Ladon-Tosh even resembles a fight between Neo and Agent Smith) and I decided about halfway through it was the explanation I was going with. But if it's not that, I need some other equally plausible explanation to make everything fall into place and make sense in my mind. Otherwise, Baldacci's world will crumble apart from my doubts.