One of my favorite books of last year and, so far, of all time (yep, I'm gonna say that). With art, magic, romance, international settings, portals between worlds, and wonderfully sensory language, this is my kind of book. Thank you, Evan, for "stealing" me an ARC of it. I've since bought my own copy. For the record, the whole time I imagined the cover looked like this instead. It just seems more fitting all around. 
 I'm finally getting around to noting my favorite quotes. 
 "Loneliness is worse when you return to it after a reprieve -- like the soul's version of putting on a wet bathing suit, clammy and miserable." 
 "Yearning for love made her feel like a cat that was always twining around ankles, meowing Pet me, pet me, look at me, love me. Better to be the cat gazing coolly down from a high wall, its expression inscrutable. The cat that shunned petting, that needed no one. Why couldn't she be that cat? Be that cat!!! she wrote, drawing it into the corner of her page, cool and aloof." 
 "Karou craved...Someone...Who would dance with her on her balcony, keep his promises and know her secrets, and make a tiny world wherever he was, with just her and his arms and his whisper and her trust." 
 "She didn't want to be released into the wild. She wanted to be held dear. To belong to a place and a family, irrevocably." 
 "She tastes like nectar and salt. Nectar and salt and apples. Pollen and stars and hinges. She tastes like fairy tales. Swan maiden at midnight. Cream on the tip of a fox's tongue. She tastes like hope." 
 "How much would your life have to suck to want the Apocalypse?" 
 "They were cartoonish, the way they blushed and smiled -- all they needed was hearts for eyes -- and watching them made Karou both deeply happy and exquisitely miserable." 
 "She was model tall and thin, with a harsh kind of beauty that was sure to age scary." 
 "Her phantom life had stopped taunting her, had slipped instead into her skin and possessed her." 
 "Being near her was like balancing on a tipping world, trying to keep your footing as the ground wanted to roll you forward, hurl you into a spiral from which there was no recovery, only impact, and it was a longed-for impact, a sweet and beckoning collision." 
 "The radiance of her eyes kindled something in him that made him aware he had passed his life in a haze of half-living, at best half-feeling." 
 "For a month of stolen nights...they cupped their wings around their happiness and called it a world, though they both knew it was not a world, only a hiding place, which is a very different thing." 
 "Happiness. It was the place where passion, with all its dazzle and drumbeat, met something softer: homecoming and safety and pure sunbeam comfort."