This would have gotten five stars but for two issues--one petty, and one not. 
 Petty: Instead of quotation marks for dialogue, Haines uses the em-dash. In some poking around online, I can find no serious precedence for doing this in English, and it was HELL distracting to me and very hard to get used to. Further, it had the effect of distancing me from the heroine, who seems more remote than I'd like her to be. Apparently this is how dialogue is sometimes marked in certain languages (namely, French, Finnish, Swedish, Greek, and Polish, among others). I honestly can't figure out, unless she wanted the ties to Greece/Rome, why she would choose this style. Even IF that's what she was going for, I can't say it was a choice that strengthened the book. Now that I think about it, I am un-labeling this as petty--it bothered me, and I can't figure out why she didn't just use the damn quotation marks. *grump* 
 Not Petty: This was really a great novel--up until the last, oh, six pages. The ending, to which there was such lovely build-up and development, is abrupt and harsh. It was the kind of ending that left me feeling slightly cheated; I was expecting an ending to match the beginning and middle. I kind of wanted to throw the book at someone. Sort of a "THAT'S not how it's supposed to end!" reaction. Highly disappointing, as endings go, but it speaks to the quality of the writing of the rest of the book that I'm still giving it 4 stars. 
 Now, it's definitely got some Hunger Games parallels. Given that it hit the shelves only a year after THG, I'm sure there's probably not any connection there. That being said, Lyn and Katniss are similar creatures, down to the lost father, unstable mother, and younger sibling needing to be protected at all costs against the broken system. If you liked THG, this will probably be up your alley. But I couldn't LOVE Lyn as much as I loved Katniss, and I'm wondering if something as small as the quotation marks issue might have had something to do with that. As I said, it had the effect of making Lyn remote. 
 I hate that this review sounds so negative. I did really enjoy the book. It's worth picking up, as long as you can get past the em-dashes.