I've followed DWJ's books for a loooong time - I can't say with authority that I've read all of them, but I've certainly read most, at one time or another. My husband grabbed this for me when he saw it at the library. It's engaging and well-constructed, with likeable characters, as usual... but there are a couple of things about it that really kind of bother me. First, within the first two chapters, we have three dead mothers and a dead grandmother in the backgrounds of the various main characters. Dead mothers are such a common trope in fiction - I wish we'd get over it - and surely an author of DWJ's skill and inventiveness could construct her characters with less of a body count. Second (spoiler!!): Right at the end of the book, we learn that one main character is not in fact the offspring of the fairy king, but is the result of a liaison between his teenaged bad-girl mother and the elderly respectable magician to whom the teenage mother was sent for straightening out. (The teenage mother was also the respectable magician's second cousin.) The book expects you to just take this in stride with a smile - "oh, they're all related, how nice" - which is what the character who finds this out does. But I'm kind of horrified! If that happened in real life, we'd call it statutory rape & it would (rightly) retroactively ruin the elder magician's reputation. With both the dead mother and the statutory rape, I almost feel like DWJ's been writing too long? - she's starting to treat plot points as only plot points, without thinking about the emotions and reactions they would provoke if they were real-world events... Anyway. It left me cross. Diana, what gives?