Ilse Witch

This falls into a number of tropes I normally dislike - big cast, dialogue-heavy, cliffhanger ending - but it's an imaginative enough world and story that I don't really mind. I know that this is part of an ongoing series, but it's the first that I read and it worked well enough as an introduction to Brooks' writing for me. The one real major pet peeve for me is the cliffhanger ending - it's really egregious in this case. I want to read the next book, so I suppose it achieved its purpose, but it rubs me the wrong way on principle. Still though, this is a book I'd recommend, I picked it up for 50p about 5 years ago and found myself pleasantly surprised.