I don’t usually do reviews in my blog–I do enough of those elsewhere. But this brings up an interesting issue for me and I wanted to get some responses. If you haven’t read it yet, you may want to give this post a pass.

Nancy Werlin blends history with fantasy in her novel about Phoebe Rothschild, of the Jewish banking Rothschild family, who we know from the beginning has been targeted by the faeries. They send her a new best friend, Mallory, but several years later they also send Mallory’s brother Ryland to seduce Phoebe into sacrificing herself.

The novel suffers from some structural problems, such as not meeting a central character until very late in the book, so I rated it 4 stars on Goodread, and in some ways it feels like a couple of very different books linked together. The last third best matches the gorgeous cover, so if that’s what you’re looking for, hang in there and you will get to it.

The heart of the book, though, lies in the disturbing middle section. The whole thing is written by Nancy Werlin, so it’s all richly imagined and beautifully expressed. But that middle part…wow.  In it, Werlin shows, scene by scene, how even a young woman from a great family can be pulled into keeping secrets and even lying to those with whom she is closest. She can be manipulated, step by creepy step, into losing sight of herself and her own perspective until she is so wracked by self-doubt that her identity begins to be destroyed.

So what I am wrestling with is wondering how much I, as a reviewer, allow a book’s message to shape my review. The message here is one that as I was reading I was already envisioning myself encouraging a kid to read. There have been many 5-star YA novels that I absolutely love but can’t imagine myself pushing on a kid because they are just too depressing and painful–Patrick Ness’s The Knife of Never Letting Go, say.  This one is a solid 4-star book so of course it’s a good one to recommend, but what if it hadn’t been quite so well-written? Would I have had such a strong urge to get that book into the hands of readers that I would have written a review to make that happen? I really wonder.

In any case, may the lushly romantic cover lure teenage girls into reading a book that may help them be on alert for the guy who is manipulating them into a dangerous situation. We have seen Werlin’s gift for exploring the effect of abusers on teens before in The Rules of Survival, but here it is packaged with faeries and loveliness.