 Millie Ball, the owner of the plantation, is included in the book's dedication as well.NPR reviewer Alan Cheuse noted that while "the dialogue now and then seems a little stilted", they nonetheless "really enjoyed watching Rice create yet another world of strangeness and transformations along the lines of her greatest achievements".Elizabeth Hand, writing for "The Washington Post", criticized the novel for offering "intriguing glimpses of the ancient history of the Morphenkinder and a tantalizing promise of darker revelations to come", yet ultimately involving a plot that is "only a series of setpieces and occasional supernatural intrusions, all too neatly resolved" that creates a written universe where "evildoers disappear down the hatch without a trace, ghosts natter on in sappy New Age-speak, and even the werewolves have been metaphorically defanged".