It took me a while to get into this book. I had received a free advance copy of the mass market copy of this book at a SF convention and with a lack of anything to do during some downtime, started reading. Honestly, the only reason I finished the first one hundred pages was because someone I knew was really enjoying it. After the hundred-page mark, the story picked up and I didn't tend notice the somewhat verbose writing style as much. I don't think I'll pick up the sequel, though. This book is

About 120 pages into this book, the plot is still not very compelling and the characters are still fuzzy. After 163 pages I gave up, deciding that I have too many enticing books on my to-be-read shelf to waste my time with characters I don't like.

Although I can see why this book has such a low rating, it certainly doesn't deserve it. If I came into it with a lot of expectations (since the publishers marketed it as though it were some kind of romantic YA fantasy), I'd rate it low too. It's basically a 400+-page prelude to the next book. Half of the narrative doesn't involve the main characters. The pace is positively glacial. However, the premise and the world of the novel (an alternate Romania) are both really fascinating and they kept t...

this series is actually very good, it's not some romance type fantasy filled with teenage angst. I really hate that genre(sorry, romance lovers) I don't think he should have named the first book this though, because that's what i thought it was from the title and the cover pic. Honestly, I think it got such low reviews on here because many of the people who picked it up to read thought they were picking up a romance/fantasy and it is in now way that. It is definitely not a princessy (like the ti...

I actually did not finish this book. I stopped at page 243. I no longer cared enough to spend any more time reading it when I have so many other books to try or great ones to reread. I would give it one star, but I actually would like to know what happens in the end. I just don't want to have to do the work to get there.

Paul Park is one of those writers that you didn't realize you had been looking for until you find him.Much is made of the autobiographical accents of these books, but what I find most fascinating is his turning of the standard "hero's journey" narrative on its head. To give too much away is to deny some of the vertiginous joy of the narrative, so I won't say much other than, what happens when your hero refuses to play by the rules of the formal narrative construct you've put her in?Make no mista...

I was desperate for a book...My desperation lead me to this dreadful chunk. The first five pages were actually interesting. There was a whisper of promise that mocked me...and then this book became a train wreck. There were no survivors.

Can't recall where I heard about this book, or what I heard that was compelling enough for me to seek it out. In any event, I did so, and by about halfway through, I strongly considered not finishing it. Had I realized it was the first in a quartet, I definitely would have stopped, because I basically slogged through 180 pages just to see how it would end, and it's basically a setup for future books.The premise is that there's an adopted teenage girl in present-day Massachusetts who turns out to...

I started reading this once and ended up putting it down. I just tried it again because the premise is an interesting one. Sadly, this time around I had to force myself to finish it.This is a very frustrating book. First of all (major pet peeve here) there is nothing anywhere on my copy that indicates it is the first of a series. Not until you reach the end where nothing is resolved and there is a preview of the next book do you get that information. I tend to buy full series all at once rather

This is a coming of age story about a young woman who discovers that, in addition to being an orphan, she is also from another dimension. In fact the most interesting quirk of the novel is the way that Park makes our world the one that isn't real (very Matrixesque). He also spends a significant portion of the book inside the heads of the "villains," increasing our sympathy for them and changing the feel of the conflict between them and our heroine and her friends. Despite all the accolades that

The basic idea for this book is a good one. A regular girl is drawn into an alternate world, and learns that she is a princess and that our world was an elaborate fiction created to hide her. The setting is fantastic, an alternate reality with a drastically different political situation, less technological advancement, and an inexplicable magical system.It starts out painfully slow, and there are plenty of other parts where the pacing feels off. The concept of the book is "girl gets transported

I could barely make myself finish this book. It was a gift from my pop, who bought it based on a newspaper review suggesting that this book was like Harry Potter. Yikes. It was not like Harry Potter - it was not easy to read, or funny, or good, or anthing. It was confusing - I felt like whole chapters must have been missing because I couldn't always follow the plot. Or else maybe I was such a sloppy reader that I really missed whole major sequences. I'm not sure, but man, don't read this.

Good premise for the story - I love a good alternate universe! Unfortunately, the book was very hard to follow and I couldn't care less about any of the characters. I didn't bother reading the other books in the series. Maybe I'm too old to be reading about disaffected teenagers........

Hard to get into. Too many characters with too little invested in them, so I spent a lot of time trying to figure out who was working for whom. It's an intriguing idea, but tries to hard to be highbrow and fails at making itself understandable enough to be enjoyable.

I'm mystified by all of the low ratings on this one. One of the better fantasy books I've read in some time. In fact, the first 3 of the series are quite good. Why Park extended this to 4 books is beyond me. The final book really didn't work for me, which kind of sucks after you invested so much time in the series. I think Park rushed these books, and should have given each of them the layering and care that I found in the first book (and, arguably, the first 3). It could have been one of the gr...

This is the first book in a new trilogy and the title character is a young woman named Miranda Popescu, a girl in her teens living in western Massachusetts. But all that's about to change as she soon learns that she's a princess from an alternate world where Roumania is one of Europe's power players in the 19th century. She and two of her friends find themselves back in this world and somewhat changed in the process. There's political intrigue and interesting characters doing weird things. There...

I enjoyed the beginning of this book, the modeling of the world, the writing, and the structure; I enjoyed so many parts of the book at that point that I wondered why I did not enjoy the book itself more. The problem with so much of literature is that what works in one book gets repeated so many times in other books that it all wears out. This book feels so much like the introduction to a series that it fails for that very reason, in my view. It is like one long preface. The world of Miranda and...

Ok, I'm going to try not to rave too much about this book, but it's SO GOOD! It sounds like it's going to be standard issue fantasy -- an adopted girl in a small town starts having weird stuff happen around her and discovers that she is a princess who is destined to fight evil in a magic world. But everyone in this book acts like a real person, not a fantasy trope. The 'evil' characters don't think they're evil. The heroine is more concerned with her relationship with her parents than fulfilling...

First let me be clear that my rating books has changed since I first joined good reads. It is now only those books that I would read again and again or how a powerful impact in my life that will get five stars. 3 is a book I liked, but probably not read again. This book falls somewhere between a two and a three. There were parts of it that I loved. When it comes to the imagination of the author I was truly blown away but his inventiveness and story ideas. But by the time I had 100 pages left I f...

Anyone who's somewhat familiar with 20th century European history will probably have come to the conclusion that, past a certain point, Romania was not a really . . . great place to live. With having a fascist dictator who thought Hitler had the right idea to the Soviets taking over and draining the country dry like a tick with voracious appetite to follow up dictator Nicolae Ceausescu finally forcing people to say "enough of this nonsense" and straight up executing him and his wife via firing s...