Andrew
Boy, did this book annoy me. If not for the dozens of people telling me to press on, the series gets better, it'll be worth it in the end, I would've happily chucked this one aside with no lingering regret.
As is, this was my third time trying to complete this book, having previously stalled out around the 10% and 25% marks, and I still set it aside for weeks at a time. All the criticisms you've heard are true: it drops you straight into the middle of a story with no preamble. There is a huge cast of characters to keep track of. It is desperately in need of an editor. Some of the races and places appear to have been named by a generic fantasy name generator (when I doubt, throw an apostrophe into the n'ame to make it s'ound e'x'o't'i'c).
The differing storylines and POV characters don't start to coalesce into an actual plot until more than halfway through the book, and that's relatively quickly and anti-climacticly wrapped up. Hard to justify why it took 500 pages to get to this point and if I ever read the next book in the series it will be down to all the assurances I've had that they get better and my own sunk cost fallacy.
Boy, did this book annoy me. If not for the dozens of people telling me to press on, the series gets better, it'll be worth it in the end, I would've happily chucked this one aside with no lingering regret.
As is, this was my third time trying to complete this book, having previously stalled out around the 10% and 25% marks, and I still set it aside for weeks at a time. All the criticisms you've heard are true: it drops you straight into the middle of a story with no preamble. There is a huge cast of characters to keep track of. It is desperately in need of an editor. Some of the races and places appear to have been named by a generic fantasy name generator (when I doubt, throw an apostrophe into the n'ame to make it s'ound e'x'o't'i'c).
The differing storylines and POV characters don't start to coalesce into an actual plot until more than halfway through the book, and that's relatively quickly and anti-climacticly wrapped up. Hard to justify why it took 500 pages to get to this point and if I ever read the next book in the series it will be down to all the assurances I've had that they get better and my own sunk cost fallacy.