I finally finished this book!!! I think it took me 2.5 months to get through this galley? That's usually not a good sign if it's taking me that long to finish something. To be fair, this book is a chunker--541 pages, to be precise. The concept was actually really fun, in the beginning. A sort of Narnia-meets-Portland kind of thing, but I got bogged down in the language and style really quickly. I mean, it's GREAT to have some complex vocab in a middle grade novel, for sure, but there were definitely some sentences that reminded me of that episode of "Friends" where Joey figures out how to use the thesaurus feature on his computer and uses it for every single word. Sometimes simpler is better, and this book just didn't have a good balance of simple vs. complex language to me. I don't think most kids will read this--at least not all the way through. It should have probably been split into 2 books, as I had trouble remembering who some characters were/what had happened in the beginning when the final battle scene took place. Audience is probably grown up Decemberist fans.