From Goodreads:  No one over the age of 13 is safe. Everyone is junked eventually: made neurotic, insecure, or fanatical. Mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, relatives and friends. And they’re the lucky ones: those who resist are terminated in seemingly random accidents and killings.

Thomas Sheepsbane and Edward Wolf are teenage psychopaths. It’s their job to orchestrate these ‘accidents’. When they deviate from their list of sanctioned methods with 17-year-old Red Phoenix, they trigger something so macabre that the world believes it’s witnessing a genuine miracle.

Red is convinced he’s losing his mind … until he gets to know Penny Lane. Penny may be the town freak but she’s the only one who seems to have an inkling into the horrifying ‘event’ that keeps on happening to him. Red and Penny go on the run from the police, the media and supernatural forces that want them both dead. And the future of humanity’s sanity depends upon them surviving long enough to unravel the mystery of Penny’s grandmother Erin Bow. Erin was abducted from Stonehenge in 1969 … leaving only her tambourine behind … through which, Penny alone is able to see…

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I love, love, love this cover!  In fact, the reason I bought this book is because of the cover.  While the premise was intriguing, I couldn’t get over the awesomeness of the artwork and I just had to have it. However, I found that, for me, the story itself was a little difficult to follow—hence the saying, never judge a book by its cover.  And yet… it was definitely interesting, though strange as well.

I found it a bit odd that all the names were basically literally symbolic to the characters, which I feel made some of the plot predictable, but at the same time, it was still intriguing. Penny Lane is our main character, and she has a terrible life.  Surrounded by crazy people she’s termed “junked,” Penny is the lone sane figure in her world, forced to pretend to be neurotic and deemed the craziest of them all.  But then she meets Red and begins to understand what is really happening to her world, and it’s outside the realms of the natural.

I enjoyed the novel, though at times found it to be a bit disorganized.  There were definitely times that I had to re-read sections in order to understand what was happening, and I felt that there were too many shifts between the plot line—as if Brent was trying to keep the story fast paced, but accidentally made parts of it hard to follow, at least for me.

Some of the elements of the novel I really enjoyed, such as the idea of being junked and being controlled by outside beings, but other aspects I wasn’t really a fan of, such as the magical tambourine.  However, since there are evil beings from another world trying to take over and kill all resisters, I guess a magical tambourine makes sense. Overall, I enjoyed this novel, but would have liked it to be a little bit tighter.  Three stars.

I purchased this novel from Amazon.