Reading this so I can talk and/or rage about it with Mattie.

I left a lot of rage in my comment on another review, but I will just say this book was an utter disappointment. The lack of quotation marks was annoying, but I could have gotten past that. Rose's ability was interesting in and of itself, but the author failed absolutely at doing anything interesting WITH it ... for a good half of the book it was an afterthought, an irrelevance. And when it was mentioned, it was disjointed, incoherent and lacked any internal consistency in what she read in the food meant. The factory thing in particular was ridiculously annoying.

Rose was boring. Maybe she purposefully made herself so, to contrast the too-interesting-mother (who also went nowhere in this story, despite a dramatic setup) and grandma (again, contrived and pointless) and brother (whose storyline I will not go into at length except so say it was a waste of space) but since none of that was ever explored, she was just boring. And, it seemed, bored. She didn't want to do anything with her life for 90% of it and it pretty much seemed to be 'because my brother didn't do anything with his life and i'm sure he had more potential than I did'

That was a disturbing trend, in a way - Joseph is more important than Rose to her mother, to her grandmother, to George, to everyone else, including the author herself. And yet for no reason and his story is only hinted at, not told. Waste of space. (rage)

Anyway, worst book I've read so far in 2011 and possibly one of the worst books I'll ever read in my life. One star may be harsh, but it's on the scale of 'this COULD have been great, considering the premise so it gets extra penalized for failure'