This was nice. The writing was, at times, very beautiful; I haven't read a book so strong in prose in a while. I'm not normally a magical realism person - usually the narration feels too hazy and vague for me, but this struck a good balance. The mystery surrounding the Lockwoods was really interesting and another strong point of the book. It reminded me of Holes but it was really unique and good to read about. I liked that Barzak chose to have Aidan's love interest be a boy. While I do wish his and Jarrod's relationship was fleshed out more, I liked it a lot. This is the sort of relationship that could just have easily been fulfilled by a girl and it wasn't, which is what I'd like from a lot of LGBT fiction. The characters - apart from Aidan's mother - weren't as developed as I would have liked them to be, but it was still good.

THIS BOOK..................!!!!!!!!! i want to keep it and hold it close to my heart forever

I thought that the plot of this story was so amazing. It was really hard to put down, and I was grossly entranced in the story for the large majority of the book. My only complaint is that the language used in the book makes it sound overly wordy and clouded some of the themes of the book, akin to an essay not meeting the proper word count, so you have to adjust to all of the embellishments found in this book. While much of this added content was a great insight into the story, some of it also took away from the imagination a bit too much. Overall though, I really enjoyed this book. I thought that the relationship between Aiden and Jarrod throughout the book was very real and down to earth, and that the story was fantastically original and creative. It was a nice book to read, and my only real regret was that I borrowed it from the library, because now I really want to reread it again. And again. And again.