This book had a lot of potential. I really enjoyed the characters that were introduced. I knew that it was the first in a trilogy, so I knew that there was a lot to cover. It just seemed that there was a lot of writing that just made me drift. It's almost as if the information given was very thorough, but of no use later on.
Even in trilogies, each book has a substory, or follows the sequence of a stand alone book so that the plot stays interesting. This seemed as though its only purpose was to set up Book 2.
For whatever reason, I felt bogged down reading this book from beginning to end. The initial setup, the prologue, was good. Quick, fast, hard. Then we spend chapters upon chapters following people doing ordinary medieval'ish stuff.
I don't care about backstabbing, power hungry Thanes and the the hassles they cause. It seemed like the main set of characters [from all sides] spent their time running around either trying to escape or to capture. For a 600+ page book, there sure was a lot of what I would classify as "setup" for the rest of the story.
It wasn't a bad read. It was well written, crafted and put together pretty good. But the story, as paced and told, just never got me excited or even really interested.
