I've read over my reviews for "The Cracked Shadow" and couldn't stop smiling. Most of the readers who won the book in the "Giveaway contest" enjoyed it but commented that it was a simple story - simple premise. And that's exactly what it is - first novel that for most authors must be simple or the execution of something more complex will get horribly botched. Many years ago, one author friend of mine told me to pick a simple premise that would hold my attention for the duration of 300 pages and write a simple but well-done story. That, according to her, was the training novel that every author must produce and only then he or she can move on to more complex plots and more complicated characters. My friend helped me with editing of that novel and I learned a lot from writing "Shadow." In fact, without having written it, I would not have been able to move on to the increasingly more complex stories that are out there and those that are in the process of being published.