I think I’m in the minority’s on this one: I don’t love this book. For many reasons, most of them personal. For one: I’m not typically a fan of family sagas. Just a personal preference of mine. However, as this book was given to me by a very close family friend, I read it anyway.

The characters I liked were Sidda and Connor. Everyone else I had some form of dislike for. Not hatred, but I didn’t like them much. They seemed odd to me, like caricatures of real people. Also, I kept getting the Ya-Yas mixed up. I feel that the author should have been able to distinguish the three non-Vivi Ya-Yas better than she did.

I don’t know if it’s just me, though, who finds those three so hard to believe as real people—I just can’t see them being real in any way.

The rest of my issues with this book have to do with the writing—I think it’s a bit purple in many places (waxing poetic about the moon every twenty pages, for example), and simplistic in others. Also, I felt that there was some romanticization of the old south and things like the Ya-Yas “Native American” ceremony that rubbed me the wrong way.