Banewreaker

Banewreaker is very different from Kushiel's Legacy. I am speculating that this story was actually written by Carey before she wrote the Legacy, she returned to it after being published and revamped it. It is not quite the caliber of writing of Legacy, but it is still top notch. The story is unique. I see all sorts of parallels to the Lord of the Rings, which I think one will see no matter what they read if it contains Men, and variations of Orcs and Elves, which have completely different names and
somewhat different descriptions, but still the parallels are there. Since things like that don't bother me, it isn't a complaint, but I know a lot of readers who are very bothered by any parallels between different novels and authors.

This had a bizarre rhythm: it started out as a great, innovative tale, then turned into a boring description of people talking about trivialities, then became an interesting mixture of plot points from the view of several different people - and then just meandered along around those people without any further developments. The central plot device is misunderstanding through fanaticism, which is fine, but gets boring after a hundred or so pages. While the writing was absolutely adequate (though Carey seems to have a penchant for “olde English” dialogue), the names were oddly mismatched and didn't seem to stem from one coherent culture.

I was growing more disappointed the more I read, and so I stopped after 200 pages.