My Review of She Dies at the End by A.M. Manay

Kept me up way past my bedtime!

This book is about twice as long as anything I've read in months, yet I still found it an extremely quick read. It's a page-turner that repeatedly kept me up later than I wanted, intending to read "just one more chapter," only to find I had to read the next, and the next, and the next. Author A.M. Manay understands how to put together compelling and original situations that seize the reader tight, balancing mysteries and revelations with a keen precision that maintains a constant sense of wonder and discovery.

Our heroine, November Snow, is a young psychic whose gifts have twisted her already-bleak life into an existence of desperate isolation and nightmare. For eighteen years, she has seen her own death in dreams -- and the lives and deaths of almost everyone around her. Plagued by extrasensory flashes she can't control, she lives as reclusively as possible, to insulate herself from constant visions. But her talent is also her only means of support, and she must put herself through torment every day giving readings from her tent in a traveling carnival.

All of this changes whipcrack fast one evening when the people she has seen burying her a thousand times finally appear at the entrance to her tent. At once, she knows her death is even nearer than she expected -- and yet she also feels a tremendous liberation: she no longer has to wait in dread for the moment that begins her end.

And she is no longer the only figure with supernatural abilities in her life, for the arrival of the strangers plunges her into a hidden world of faeries, vampires, and werewolves she had never before imagined. Forces beyond her understanding want to capture her, to bind and use her power. And the certainty of dying young no longer reins as the greatest thing she has to fear. What's most remarkable about the book is November's ability to continuously surprise us and those around her. A life of pain and darkness and terror has equipped her uniquely to accept the sudden alteration of reality, and has lent her a strength of character and a stubborn, determined core of hope that helps her again and again to bear the unbearable and shake off things that would paralyze most ordinary people.

"She Dies at the End" glows with the vulnerable brightness of its protagonist and sparkles with a cast of vivid, complex characters. It spins a web of ancient enmities and epic clandestine war, builds a shadow world beneath our own, and makes us root for its heroine on every page and through every danger.