I like the story and all, but I can't help but feel like the author copped out on the premise. She's supposed to be able to see emotions, but somewhere along the way it morphed into seeing the little emotional puffballs holding signs that explicitly spell out the person's thoughts. That's kind of lame because her being empathic but not outright telepathic would be interesting since it's different from other "I can secretly read thoughts" types of stories. So now it's just the same as everything else with only the fact that it has enjoyable characters to carry it.