It's demanding for readers.  Then again, I figured again there's
a whole nation of people who were just besotted with Lost and
they seemed to jump around a lot and they forgave a lot just to
get through the story.  They seem to be able to keep track of
that.  You just tell them to look at it like a miniseries.  Two
of the first characters that readers encounter are Kit and his
girlfriend Wilhelmina.  They both seem to be leading kind of
blasé lives at first.  And then BOOM.  Kit's great-grandfather
Cosimo arrives on the scene, and he and a little ley-line
travelling change all of that.  Survival sharpens your wits a
bit.  But they're just, I think, typical of so many people,
modern urban dwellers in particular—you're in a big city and the
demands of work and social pressures of various sorts, and it's
easy to lose yourself.  You just let things slide, one by one. 
And as Cosimo tells [Kit] in the beginning, "You have your
friends who you see less and less of, they've all moved out,
they've got families and st