The best bit of this by far is the romance. All her life, June / Jack / Junior o'Donnell has been warned not to go near the Angert family who live on the other side of the forest. So when she literally bumps into the beautiful Saul Angert (in a House of Mirrors at the carnival - where else? This is a magic realism book, after all) and she feels an attraction to him, she knows it's not going to end well.
I really liked the romance in this book. It was paced exactly right and the two characters were exactly the right amount of sarcastic with each other. Like they weren't all swoony and shit. Obviously theirs is The Love That Will End In Disaster, because this is magic realism, and if love doesn't have the power to literally break the world in half, then what good is it??
The actual bit about the curse and the history of why the two families hated each other rambled on a bot and I lost interest after a while. I didn't really care about the cherry tree or some old dudes hating each other and the events of the feud unfolded a bit too slowly for me.
Also, magic realism. Have I said how much I dislike magic realism? It all just feels so ... artificial. It's like a big plastic cherry on your banana split. Bleugh. There was a tree that had its own silly name and wasn't always in the same place (of course) and ghosts and tiny floating memories that settle on your skin and show you a slice of the past. It's all so twee and annoying.
Despite this, I found the book to be pretty good and the romance has lifted the score right up to a decent three stars.
3 stars