Alice Hoffman is certainly a talented writer at the sentence level, and I found myself carried along by the strength of her writing, especially as I neared the end. But there was much in the book that I didn't care for or agree with. Many times I've heard male authors criticized for allowing their female characters to be two-dimensional, but this is one of the few times I've read a book by a woman and felt that the male characters were two-dimensional. I never had the sense that any of them really existed except as potential love interests for the female characters, and that bothered me after a while. It also bothered me that Hoffman has such a narrow view of romantic love. If it isn't making your tongue roll on the floor and your eyes bug out and your heart thump in your chest like a cartoon character, then she doesn't seem to think it exists. Because of these problems, I'm not sure if I'll ever read another Hoffman book after this. But, on the other hand, at least it was better than Garden Spells.