I'm breaking my normal rule to go ahead and review this book. Normally I don't review books I haven't read recently. The last time I read this was around the time the third or fourth book in the series was published, but I feel I can give it an honest review.

I rag on this series a lot, but this first book was actually a somewhat enjoyable read. The characters were engaging and the concepts introduced were interesting. If it had been the first in a trilogy rather than an introduction to an interminably long "epic" it would have been decent.

Unfortunately, it wasn't, and by the time I got to the 6th book in the series my patience with the story was exhausted. The characters and concepts that I'd found interesting in the first book, I now just found annoying to the point that I no longer cared what happened to them, so I stopped reading the series.