That book had me confused for a while, I thought it was a YA Romance and, well? Despite acknowledging Marek as the love-interest from the beginning, this novel doesn't start being a Romance novel well into the second part of the book. As of the ya genre: what makes this novel a ya novel? I am genuinely asking. I though that the main common element of all ya fiction was that the main characters were ya themselves (and in fact I already had that problem with The Piper's Son, but I agreed to the ya classification because it was the sequel of a ya novel), but neither Ellen nor Marek are, so, what makes a ya novel be a ya novel? 
 The only thing that bothered me a little bit was the ending. I would have liked it to end at the first part -- not to avoid the drama of the second part, I love drama, but because I thought it was somehow forced? And that the real ending was not worth the suffering? But yeah, it was good in general.