"The first casualty of a civil war was justice."

Well, I finally did it. I finally knocked this one off my to-read list at the expense of my yearly goal (I’m two books behind now!), and I feel good about finally working my way through it. This is a weird book for me to rate, because I’m not very religious and I can’t exactly say I enjoyed it all the way through, but I’m still putting book two on my to-read list for….sometime in the future. Maybe next year.

This is a book about a man with a dream to build a church. Things start small, then quickly snowball as these things do, creating a real mess of church problems and state problems along the way. The lines between the two were, basically, nonexistent back then. Lots of political infighting, jockeying for position within the church/country, stuff like that. Amongst it all we get to know a few members of the village/town/city of Kingsbridge, and follow them as they experience the repercussions of these choices down at the personal level.

I definitely enjoyed some of the points of view more than others. Ailena was far and away my least favorite perspective in the beginning, had some redemption in the middle, and then returned to being my least favorite in the end. Philip, the prior of Kingsbridge, ended up being my favorite point of view, as we see his dreams of a new church building come to fruition. His internal struggles the entire way were interesting to read about, particularly when he struggles constantly with personal pride as a member of the church. I enjoyed the writing, the story was pretty great, I just felt like it dragged a bit in places. I guess in a book of almost 1000 pages it’s to be expected, though.

I don’t know, I’m glad to have finished it and have added the sequel to my to-read list, but I’m not sure who I’d recommend it to. It comes with some religious baggage, so if that’s not your jam, I’d probably pass on it unless you can set your personal feelings aside to experience a good, realistic, medieval story.