LOCUS: “New and Notable” for 2009 !!

Kirkus Best of YA book 2009
Cybils Short List 2010
Garden State Teen Book Awards 2010

KIRKUS:
“…Thrumming with dense, meaningful tension…through despair, oppression and rare moments of hope. The text so successfully portrays Hahp’s experience in this grueling, cold-blooded wizard “academy”—isolation, starvation, abuse and constant, unsolvable puzzles—that readers may absorb his strain, confusion and desolation themselves… unwaveringly suspenseful.”

HORN BOOK:
“When the last page of this exquisitely suspenseful fantasy is turned, readers will be satisfied…but they will feel like they are still living in Duey’s world…waiting, impatiently, for Duey to conjure the concluding volume.”

LIBRARY REVIEW:
“This novel is filled with violence. Violence so shattering that it is hard to read, harder to process… She is an author who pushes it to a new limit, daring the reader to read on, dancing on the knife’s edge. All to great and dazzling effect.”