I liked this book better when I just read the jacket description. It's about Rose, a slave girl who's parents marry her off to "the Thing," a monster that lives in their master's attic, in exchange for her freedom. I was hoping this book would give me shivers, but it fell short in the creepy department. I sort of expected it to follow a Beauty and the Beast progression (girl sees beauty in the Thing and comes to love him), but it followed more of a Phantom of the Opera progression instead: girl realizes that, because Thing has been mistreated his entire life, he's turned into someone with a twisted soul, and she comes to loathe him. Unlike Christine, she never excercised much compassion for the Thing. At times her prejudice was irritating, but I mostly understood it because she was forced into this marriage against her will.

There were a lot of elements that didn't seem to tie together at the end, which may be because this is a prequel to another book or may be just because Dia Calhoun has a habit of introducing lots of fantasy-genre type goodies without following through with them. At any rate, I did get a strong sense of place and parameters for this story, which I appreciated. But it never lived up to the potential it promised.