The experience is captivating and the writing is creative and well done. The characters are well defined and personable. The focus on revenge, however, seems unnecessary. The author spends a lot of words on making the bad guys unlikeable so the actions of the main characters can be justified, but it only works if the reader has very flexible morals. If the aim was more on relieving the suffering of the victims, a bit of revenge wouldn’t have been amiss, but the victims seem more like an afterthought. This makes the main characters hard to like. “Revenge is bittersweet” is a cliche for a reason, but the author writes as if revenge is just sweet. There could have been interesting conflict and character development built around this theme, but instead this fact of life was just plain overlooked and/or ignored.