Jeff

As epic fantasy goes, this is a rather simple plot, with decent character development for the primary characters. This is not great fantasy by any means nor is it bad as some others have stated.

I have been reading epic fantasy for 30 years. For the past 5 years I have been listening to audio books during my long drive to find new authors or listen to books I never got around to reading.

The book has a predictable plot but it is a nice story on a couple of fronts. The main character, Paks, is able to escape a mundane life and follow her dreams. This is also a classic good versus evil and of course good prevails.

If you are looking for a simple yet nice story, give this a listen. The subsequent book builds on the story.

I am hit or miss on Dave Duncan's works and found myself bored with this book. Far too much about the time period and locale versus plot and characters. I am not going on with this series.

I enjoyed this book so much that I quit listening to it and bought the book. I tend to pay more attention when reading versus listening and this clearly merits the effort.

The story telling and plot are very compelling. As a sign of high praise, I was as pleased with Rothfuss' first book as when I first read Goodkind or Rawn. This is a must read/listen for epic fantasy fans.

While there were some predictable parts to this there were also some surprises. Overall this is a fast paced book that keeps your attention until the end.

I do have to say that I was very tired of the narrator by the end. There are multiple spots where the book switches to another subplot and there not even a pause between sentences. I had to back up and really pay attention to catch the change.

As others have indicated, this tale takes a long time to get going. You will need to invest 10 to 15 hours of listening up front before the story becomes very interesting. Once past the beginning, I really did enjoy the book. The characters are well developed and it is not a typical fantasy setting. I would have given this 5 stars if it had not started so slowly.

I have read/ listened to all of Jordan's books in the series over the many years. When the series started I thought it was bound to be one of the classics. It is NOT.

When a story has so many sub-plots, hundreds of characters and is thousands of pages long it becomes tedious to follow. I downloaded this and listened for over 10 hours and decided it is not worth my time.

Jordan's early books were great and I am also a Brandon Sanderson fan. They decided split the final book into multiple books just to continue the tedious story and it style of wandering. Sanderson would have made many of us happy if he had continued his style, instead of mimicking Jordans, and brought the threads together quickly.

Sorry to say, I am quitting on this series after having invested hundereds of hours in it.