I love the way this page-turner keeps springing surprises! The fantasy setting is familiar enough, but makes a great background for some new tricks. If you like this sort of thing then this is a particularly good specimen of a fantasy trilogy. It is very character-centered (easy to care about the goodies, and lots of hissable baddies though sadly no gray areas), has a rip-roaring adventure plot and a reasonably well delineated setting. It's a long tale (500+ pages) but a fairly quick read, although not the sort of book for skimmers as there is a lot in here, and you might miss something. I look forward immensely to finding out not only what happens in the final volume, but to seeing what this author will come up with next. It is not easy to write a long book (and never easy to write a good middle volume of a trilogy) and pack it full of incident and color, but this is exactly what has happened here. If you don't like this, you probably don't like fantasy (so why are you reading this review?)