After hearing rave reviews, I had hope that I would really enjoy this book, and while I didn’t entirely hate it, I didn’t love it either. At 848 pages, this book is a monstrosity, and a very confusing one at that. I spent the first 200 pages struggling to remember this names of the characters and where they lived since it is all kind of thrown at you very quickly, but once the story started picking up a bit it was much easier to remember who was who and by the middle of the story I found myself enjoying the story and the pacing much more. 

I do have a few grievances with this book. The first half of the book was very hard to follow, I did not understand the motivations of the characters at all and I did not enjoy reading it quite as much as I usually do when reading a fantasy novel. There were also some scenes that I believe were suppose to come across as plot twists but didn’t really fit and seemed like they were thrown in there to move the story along. The quickness made it very jarring and didn’t really allow me to feel any remorse for the characters as they went through loss or other failures. That mixed with the language being very difficult to understand caused me to constantly be pulled out of my immersion in this story and It almost made me put down the book for good. The pacing was very strange to me as well. There were parts that seemed very quick and caught my attention easily but the rest seemed to drag on so slowly that reading it became exhausting. After getting through the beginning, I did start to really enjoy this book, but once I got to the ending I was very disappointed. Somehow the final battle and aftermath was wrapped up in less than 100 pages and it was very unsatisfactory. Not only was it clunky and difficult to read, I also had to look up clarifications to try to understand what happened. It seems like this book is set up for a sequel without the author actually intending to write one.

Even with my gripes about this story, there is some immaculate writing done here. This is a massive world that is being written into one book and the world building is very extensive and interesting. While I didn’t find the characters all that likable most of the time, it added a lot of depth and I was very entertained by each character’s relationship with the others. By far the most redeeming qualities this book has are the different creatures and the magic systems. You don’t meet the animal companions right away but they made the storylines so interesting and the communication between them and their human counterparts kept me reading even when I was frustrated with the rest of the story. When I though the story couldn’t possibly have impressed me more that was when you start to fully get into the magic and learn more about it’s history and how it works. It became a main focus that carried through to the end and that is where you really start to see the character development emerge. The romance in this book snuck up on me but it was very much a side plot and I feel like that works to its advantage and I appreciate that it doesn’t distract from the main plot points and events. This is also one of the first books I’ve read that had some significant character deaths that really fit into the story. It was sad but once I finished the story I realized how necessary it was for the characters to get where they needed to be.

While this book may not have been quite my style, I have never read anything like it and I can see why so many people love it. There is a big part of me that is sad to let these characters go and if there ever is word of a sequel I would definitely consider reading it.