When I read Romeo & Juliet for the fist time I knew how it would end. Everyone knows how it ends... It's devastating and in all sense of the word, a pure tragedy. 
 But as I continued on through that story and grew to love those characters; and the relationship and the innocence of an all-consuming love that they couldn't even really comprehend beyond their young years; I remember thinking that I wanted the ending to change. I needed it to change because I couldn't handle what needed to happen in order to end the cycle of violence between those two families. I knew it needed to happen, Shakespeare knew it needed to happen... but I wished and wished it would end differently anyway. 
 That's what this book is. That's what Colleen did. She wrote a story where you grow to love these characters and you see them for all their virtues but also for all their flaws. She showed us a world that needed to be seen and then she brought us to a place we knew she had to go in order for people to truly get it. 
 And in the end, you want it to end so differently... but if you were paying attention at all, you just know... 
 that it needed to happen.