As much as I usually enjoy Orson Scott Card, I thought this book was dumb. It's a kids book, not a novel, and not a particularly good one. It tries to smash together a modern day marriage/internet drama with medieval fantasy. I understand that Orson Scott Card and Nathan Pinnock (illustrator) were trying to be creative, but it doesn't work well and the pictures have a bad photoshopped feel to them. I'm pretty sure the story is based on something that happened to someone Orson knows in real life and he felt like making a lesson out of it about the evils of online chat.