Mackie Doyle lives in the town of Gentry. His dad is a minister at the local church, his sister is a successful college student studying biology, and his mom is a well-respected member of the community. The problem is the Doyles share a secret ... and it is about Mackie.

Mackie is not exactly what he seems. He needs to avoid anything with iron in it, including blood, or he finds himself feeling extreme pain and actually forms welts. The result is the need for the family to remove all silverware and other related tools from the house. He also must be very careful when he is at school or out in public so he doesn't stand out as being different.

Unfortunately, that has not been completely successful. Mackie feels distant from his fellow students with the exception of his best friend Roswell. Everyone else, at least to him, seems a bit stand-offish or uncomfortable around him.

The odd thing is that the Doyle's secret is really more of an unspoken understanding in Gentry rather than being unkown. Once every 7 years, a child is taken from the community by a mysterious group of former-Celtic gods/evil faeries and replaced with a changeling that is really one of their own. The children are given to the dark ones as part of a deal that helps protect Gentry from harm and guarantee prosperity. It turns out that Mackie is one of these replacements

Things begin to come to a head when the younger sister of one of Tate Steward, one of Mackie's classmates, is taken for the next round of the agreement. With Mackie's growing awareness of what he is and what it means for the community, he is not willing to allow things to continue. He works with his sister Emma, Tate, Roswell, and some other teens in the community in an attempt to confront the evil faeries in the hopes of saving the child and the future of the town's kids.

Besides getting incredible reviews, I was really drawn to this book after a number of my students from the Reading Interests of Young Adults course I teach read the book and gave unanimous rave reviews to it. It is an intriguing concept, and the story is peopled with complex, realistic and interesting characters. Yovanoff does an incredible job of slowly revealing the facts of what is going on to the reader. In a way, I found the book to be a bit like some of Stephen King's horror tales, and that is what this story is ... a horror tale.

I did feel like the pacing was a bit slow, but it was definitely worth digging through the story to get to the end. I think the trouble with the pacing is that Mackie does a lot of thinking about what he is going to do and what other people think rather than letting the story progress a bit more with people's actions. Slimming that aspect down would have made for a tighter novel, but the book is still really good.