I'm not sure Heart's Blood actually stands with my other five star books in terms of how much I loved it, but it's the first of Juliet Marillier's books I've read (the other two being Wildwood Dancing and Cybele's Secret) that I felt genuinely excited about and eager to read, once I'd started. I ended up loving it quite a lot, with 'just a few more pages' syndrome and, near the end, excited little eeps and sighs. I'd hoped to enjoy Marillier's work more than I did, so it was lovely to thoroughly enjoy this, and that's probably inflated my rating an extra star.

I do have reservations about it -- the narrator, the main character, was not very well differentiated from Marillier's other narrators. There was the same tone, the same inclinations... There were differences in the characters, and they're certainly not carbon copies, but it didn't come through in her tone.

I was also a little put out by how quickly I realised the true identity of a certain character, and how long it took the main character to realise the same.

But, yes, for the most part, I loved it. It's an inventive retelling of Beauty and the Beast, it has a disabled protagonist, the issues of abuse which hover around it like a cloud from the very first pages are well-handled... I could believe in the situation, whole-heartedly: I enjoyed the setting, and the supporting characters, and believed in how they related to each other. For the first half of it, I couldn't predict what was going to happen, and I couldn't predict the way Marillier was going to reinterpret the story.

If there's to be a series, as I've seen suggested, then I'll definitely buy any subsequent books. But it does stand alone, too: it has a proper resolution, and the end is hopeful and suggesting the future without requiring follow-up, as such.