*SPOILERS!* 
 This novel is fantastic and at some points I was on the edge of my seat while reading it as quickly as I could to see what would happen next. The premise is interesting, the main characters are great. Some of them you love and some of them you hate more than you can imagine. 
 I really was riveted, so why three stars? 
 Well, the novel has some weaknesses that add up. 1) Stephen Kind has a tendency to become fixated on certain sayings or notions. In this book it's the song lyric, "It's a small town and we all support the team". He repeats this over and over until you're sick of reading it. Anytime something happens some character is bound to think to themselves, It's a small town and we all support the team.> Gets annoying. 2) This novel has a lot of characters. Now, King is known for this and it's not usually a problem, but for some reason in this novel a lot of the characters are so completely forgettable and appear so infrequently that I found it almost impossible at times to keep track of them all. They appear once every couple hundred pages for a sentence or two and I'm left thinking, "Is that the guy who ______ or the one who runs the ______ or the one whose wife ______?" 3) (view spoiler)[The ending. Oh god, the ending. King's endings are almost always a let down for me, but this one is a real whopper. Child aliens who are playing with humans? It sounds like a joke and it let down the entire novel. Just deflated it. And the way that they convinced the child aliens to let them go was just plain laziness in my opinion. It really came across like King was just tired of writing this book and wanted it to end. (hide spoiler)] 
 (view spoiler)[Another thing that really irked me was Big Jim's end. He is a major force throughout the entire book. I mean, he is relentless and then his death is silly and completely out-of-character (in my opinion) and what is worse is that you never see a reaction to it! It's like he's the main villain the entire novel and you just can't wait for him to get that smug, self-righteous grin wiped off his face and then he just vanishes completely from the book and every character's minds and THE END. It's all a complete waste. (hide spoiler)] 
 The novel is worth reading, but it had some major drawbacks in my mind.