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Good first: the characters were generally pretty charming. The romance was cute and believable. Upbeat, positive, heartwarming.

But ultimately this didn't work for me, for two main reasons. First, the prose style and its overuse of paragraph breaks. To lend some kind of gravitas, I guess. Or to force comedic timing.

I don't know why this bothers me so much. Because it's gimmicky? It's too cutesy and twee? Or maybe—and this ties into the second issue I had with the book—because it feels condescending, like the book is trying to push me into reading it in a specific cadence rather than being confident in its own prose and trusting me as a reader.

"Not trusting the reader" is a decent way to sum up my second, deeper issue. The book is just so didactic and unsubtle, and there's no bigotry in it so bigoted that it can't be resolved or at least stopped short by some grandiose speechifying. The most interesting character in this regard is Helen, the mayor of the town, who has good intentions and comes to understand that she hasn't been bearing them out in her actions. But there's never really any conflict there, and the conflicts that do exist thenceforth get resolved easily by the aforementioned speechifying or by Helen's using her position to browbeat the townsfolk into compliance.

OK, fine. There's a third thing. I won't get into the metaphysics of what it means that Lucy exists, because the book doesn't either, but it seems emblematic of its general shallowness that the main character who is described as non-religious doesn't reckon with that in any way upon finding out that the literal Antichrist literally exists. But also: the threats that these kids pose to the world, excepting Lucy, are just ridiculously oversold. It's the son of the apparently Biblical Satan, whatever that means in a world where being non-religious is an actual thing, and a bunch of random and almost completely harmless little varmints. Why is this Level 4 Classified or whatever?

All in all: heart in the right place, enough charming moments to get me through it, but overall the execution fell flat for me.

It's called "The Appeal" because the layers of deception keep "a-peeling" back!!!!!!!!!!!!

I was half-tempted to go back and reread this immediately upon finishing, so effective were the multiple reveals in the book's last third. It would probably feel like a very different book if you read it with the knowledge of what's really going on — but all these characters are so unlikable in so many different ways that I didn't really want to subject myself to their two-faced, petty correspondences again. If you can get past that, this is a really well-constructed book.

Well, I didn't see the Big Reveal coming but then I hardly ever do with those kinds of things. I found this pretty absorbing but there were three sizable flaws for me: 1. That much-vaunted Plot was not so compelling as to deserve the awestruck treatment it gets by the book's characters 2. I'm not convinced that the threat of being revealed as a plagiarist was (a) legitimate, because an IDEA for a plot and a few pages of intro material do not a book make, or (b) ever much of a threat, given that there was no way for the person making it to prove it without outing themselves as a murderer 3. I thought the section where the main character was traipsing all around the country looking for Clues was too drawn-out and not interesting enough to warrant all that page time

Honestly a lot more enjoyable than I feared. The central conflict is so Victorian it seems absurd from the vantage of 2024, but once I settled in to that just being How Things Were (and appreciated that the book is a challenge to that state of affairs) it was pretty readable and not quite as dour as I'd been led to believe. Still pretty fucking dour though. Poor Tess. Naïve as all get out, but still, no one in this book deserved you.