Really a terrific world he built, I will be selling this trilogy on my eleven year-old SF/F enthusiast, and I look forward to reading the new ones the author has coming out that are set a few hundred years later. The theme of the trilogy is faith, and my faith in the series was tested by the overly-long sieges of successive cities that dominated the second and third books, and the not-quite-paper-thin but still very one-dimensional protagonists. But it all wrapped up in a way that showed the author knew where he was going the whole time, which I always appreciate, plus the depiction of (spoiler alert) omnipotence in the climax of the third book was exemplary for the genre.