taken from Goodreads:
"A shining debut novel set in a land of haunting darkness
Darkness falls so quickly in Howland that the people there have no word for evening. One minute the sky is light; the next minute it is black. But darkness comes in other forms, too, and for Annie, the misery she endures in her uncle's household makes the black of night seem almost soothing. When Annie escapes, her route takes her first to a dangerous mine, and later to the king's own halls, where a figure from Annie's past makes a startling appearance. All the while, reported sightings of kinderstalk-mysterious creatures that prowl Howland's dark forests-grow more frequent."
This YA novel held a lot of promise, but I felt the author never really delivered on it. The initial concept was fantastic, if a bit dark and quite depressing. The protagonist, Annie, was really compelling though, and her two cats become secondary characters that perked me right up every time they appeared. At some point, maybe a third to half-way through the novel, the feeling of the whole book seems to change. A number of new plot developments are introduced, and what started off as a quirky dark fantasy seems to become more predictable and less likeable. At this point, the problem becomes one of execution, as Breen seems less capable of adeptly working all of these different elements together into a cohesive whole. This is one YA series where I'm not sure I'll be picking up the sequel, for the simple fact that the story I started reading is not the same story I finished reading.
