It certainly takes some effort to get through this book, but it's worth it. Nothing much seems to happen and some parts are quite tedious (e.g. some of the long speeches), but in the end, I found I wanted to read through to see what would happen to the prince and the other characters next.

However, the story did sometimes get confusing due to the large array of characters that are frequently called by different names (according to the Slavic customs) and the quite archaic English translation (I was certainly happy with the built-in dictionary of my e-reader).