The odd magic,characters and phonetic familiarity is what made this book so great for me. Granted, it was a bit hard to get into and I stopped after reading a third of it for no apparent reason but when I finally continued reading I couldn't put it down. Besides the characters I have really loved the setting and most importantly the names of places that I could pronounce and felt odd seeing in a book written in English. Old stories and elements are taken and used nicely without making them a cheap copy of the real world things they were inspired by.