3/5

I enjoyed the premise of the book where you must whatever is left inside a city to defend it from an attacking force. There was certainly a lot of good engineering details about how the defenses worked using the ropes and pulleys which was pretty cool and it really made the whole thing quite believable.
However there were some issues with the main character, Orhan, that I was not the biggest fan of. Orhan was not a good person, which isn't always necessary to make a good story, but in this case it felt almost like the author was going out of his way to make the reader not like him. His humor felt rather immature at times as well.
I was not the biggest fan of the prose either, just not my style and felt almost choppy, and there were also some questionable plot aspects as well. There was a clear lack of women and the few that were around were not particularly fleshed out well enough. Finally, the ending was also not well executed and fell rather flat.
Overall, it feels like a miss for me. There were some good aspect there, but not enough for me to want to pick up another book from this author again.