I usually gauge how good a book was by how long it takes me to read it (following the logic that the more into it I am, the more I'm going to sacrifice work/school/etc. to read it)... Yeah, I had this book done in about a week.  I couldn't put it down.  I was reading it at work just because I found myself wondering what was happening next.  I felt so involved that when I wasn't reading I almost felt like I might be missing something!  Definately a great book.

I am in total love in "War of the Flowers". This is my favourite book, not only from Tad's and I am so happy it came to my life and remained.
First at all, great idea for fairy world being so close to ours - I always seen Faerie as dark and different place, not looking as close to ours as Tad probably wanted to show, but it was in the same hostile as huge city's streets at night.
Great villains, especially my namesake, probably best villain in both worlds.
And main character, so similar to avarage peoples lifes...I strongly felt connection with him. Not perfect but brave and responsible.

Love it!

Tailchaser wrote:

I really thought the main character was a loser in the beginning

He kind of was, actually.  Isn't that rather the point? 

I mean, he wasn't a _bad_ guy, in the sense of being a constant jerk or anything (that would make him much harder to swallow as a protagonist), but his life was going nowhere, and he didn't really have the drive to do anything about it.  Come to find out, he didn't really belong here at all.  His live was NEVER going to go anywhere here.

It's a reasonably good formula for escapist fiction:  anyone who's not really happy with how their life is going can sort of identify with the character, and even people who aren't in that situation currently may be able to sympathize.  Virtually everyone can dream what it would be like to visit a completely other world and find out you actually belong there, instead of in the boring mundane regular world (which, for all its objective value and quality, does nonetheless leave something to be desired on occasion, for everyone I think).

But the basic formula isn't what makes the book good.  You could give most writers the same basic formula (dude's life is going nowhere; then his mom dies; come to find out his uncle left some weird journal and an account that leads to a secret way to get to fairyland; when dude gets there, people are trying to kill him, et cetera right on through to dude falls in love with emo-egalitarian fairy chick, decides to stay in fairy land, then realizes he couldn't have left anyway) and they'd churn out a book that wouldn't be nearly as good.