I love Gregory Maguire's blurb on the cover of this one:"The Chosen One makes the heart race, the teeth grind, and the brow bead up in sweat"
It is so true. This is such a stressful book to read. I am really glad that it is short because I don't think I could handle any more if had been longer. This is an excellent book and very well written. But incredibly creeptastic. It made my stomach hurt, made me cry, and left me feeling so unsettled.
I was nervous to read this because of the polygamy and felt better when I saw one of the blurbs was from a children's lit professor at BYU and then I put 2 and 2 together and realized that I didn't need to worry, that Carol Lynch Williams, was one of us (hooray for religious solidarity!).
She wasn't going to mess this up and lump us in with the polygamists as so many in the media do. So that made me relieved and I could just get sucked into this very sad story without being ready to pounce about any inaccuracies about my religion which is so very different from Kyra's religion. I think it added to the strength of the story that the location was vague and I do think that a non-LDS author would just have assumed that the story needed to be somewhere near Utah or that they needed to drop Mormons into the mix. I think Kyra's community felt even more isolated and cut off from the world making her flight even more frightening because of this.
{Don't keep reading, Gnorah, if want to read this and you don't want to know the ending}
This is one of those books that is so well done & real that I was physically disturbed. The characters are so real and I was so upset about Joshua. I think that the ending was very appropriate. As a reader I couldn't have handled Kyra losing her battle but it also would have been so fake to have Joshua show up in the last few pages even though that is obviously what I was rooting for. I like that the ending gave Kyra some peace but not everything wrapped up in a pretty bow.
