Something Rising teeters on the brink of being brilliant, but never quite makes it there. The writing is great (I suspect if I read an excerpt, I'd give it a higher rating than I would the whole book), so much so that I find myself wanting to like the story more than I do. But if I'm honest with myself, this ends up in the "liked but did not love" pile. The biggest problem is that I have no idea what Cassie wants. She plays pool and does day labor and has never filed a tax return. Ok. But what does she want?! In the end there's a deus ex machina, which combined with a foreshadowed (called it!) development, gets Cassie out of her rut... the end. Essentially, everyone in the story is passive and only ever does anything in reaction to events that happen to them.