I had this on my To Read shelf and then it was picked for my YA book club, so I was excited that we had a book that I actually wanted to read. Boy was I wrong on that! I came real closed to DNFing this about 4 times leading up to the picking of the Favorite.

I understand that she is world-building, but there was just TOO MUCH! Too much description about EVERYTHING-the clothes, the hair, the stupid carriages they rode in. This was on par for Anne Rices' over-descriptiveness in the Witching Hour (where she spends the front & back of 3 pages describing the stupid wallpaper!). If this has been edited to cut out 1/2 of the description, it would have cut the book down by a good 75 pages and I might not have been bored out of my mind.

Once the Favorite was picked, it got a little better, but I was still skimming paragraphs to avoid falling into a description coma. In our group of 11 for this YA meeting, only 2 people actually liked this, so I'm not sure how it has such a high rating. It ended on a cliff-hanger and while we all want to know what happens, we nominated the 2 people that liked it to read the next one and tell us what happens, because we're not interested in actually reading the next book.