Picked this up at a bookstore last Sunday and finished this today. Literally had no idea what to expect. Loved it.
Myfanwy losing her memory enables her to discover things right alongside the reader which was fun. A lot of the blurbs on the book itself referenced how this was "such and such" meets "such and such" and it wasn't until halfway through that I realized that O'Malley had taken an X-Men concept and turned it on it's head. The imaginative powers, the mystery traitor, the centuries long cold war, just a bunch of fantastic world-building plot points. The fact that the Chequy has existed for such a long time opens up for possible prequels and short stories in the future. Reading about various incidents throughout history was a bonus part of the book.
This succeeded at being funny, interesting, and even scary at times and reminded me of a book series I started last year (The Magicians and The Magician King by Lev Grossman) in that it introduces a world that has its roots in our own, but then introduces a secret fantastic element which is heavily influenced by the world of pop culture and other fantasy lands. I'm looking forward to O'Malley's future books, whether they cover this same universe or are something totally different.
