This is not a stand alone book AT ALL. In fact, another reviewer who read the rest of the series stated that this is literally the first chapter of the first book, so it's not even its own piece of writing. Talk about a waste of time! What's more, while the actual writing is fine the story if not. It starts out with something mildly interesting and then moves backwards through the day leading up to that point, getting progressively less interesting, until it is reduced to describing bedrooms and where people buy make-up brushes. Boring. And of course, you never learn anything more about the mildly interesting, unexplained thing that happened in the beginning.