I only read all of DWJ's books for the first time a few years ago, and for the most part I found them exquisite and entrancing (and could really see why she was a formative writer for so many people). Fire and Hemlock is the only one that really, really didn't work for me, and in some ways it's the most complicated and ambitious of the lot. So I can understand and admire what she was trying to do, even if I didn't connect with it at all.