This gripping story works because its rootedness in history aptly counterbalances the paranormal, coincidental events that move it toward the fantastic. Sasha is a sympathetic and believable character. Her father's sternness and her mother's timidity bespeak common attitudes of the time, but they are not fully developed characters; the real drama lies in Sasha's interior life, her wrestling with what to do with what she knows, her love for her brother, and her odd, unromantic, desperate connection with a disenchanged soldier who shares her gift of occasional foreknowledge. The book raises a number of interesting questions not only about the role of dreams, hints, guesses, and premonitions, but also about how the terms of the social and familial contracts change in times of war, and specifically, how it is incumbent upon those who seek to be healers and peacemakers to act in the face of immense pressures to participate in slaughter.