It took me two weeks to finish this small book. I was continually being distracted by other things. I can't say if that was completely due to the book's not holding my interest or that I subconsciously wanted a break from reading or I simply assigned a higher priority to those other things. It's not like I don't find some fantasy intriguing but I seemed to have more difficulty with the quirky "magic" the characters in The Sugar Queen had versus the other two Sarah Addison Allen books I read: Garden Spells and The Girl Who Chased the Moon. I'm not going to offer any spoilers I just feel these mystical occurrences distracted me from the human emotions and kept me from feeling a strong literary attachment to the characters. I did find the story imaginative and original, just not enough to rate it any higher.