I respect this book more than I love it. It's a fresh take on the fantasy genre with extremely vivid settings and characters and some seriously brutal violence. At the same time, it never really hooked me and by the end it didn't feel like the sum was greater than the parts.

I'm sure there's an argument for it being the point but to me it felt like - after the first 200 or so pages - you could put this book down at any time and you'd be taking away as much as someone who read the whole thing.