Moira Guthrie (moirawr) - , reviewed on 8/13/2012 + 3 more book reviews

Gardens of the Moon started off slow. Really slow. I put it down several times, read a few other books, before picking it back up again. It did, however, get interesting towards the end but honestly not enough to have me pick up the second in the series.

There is a lot of jargon specific to Erikson's world bandied about, especially in the first chapters with nothing to explain the meaning of the words. You have to puzzle the words together to make an educated guess as to their meaning. This makes it very hard to get into since every few pages you are stopping and trying to figure out if you missed something.

At one point of the book, Erikson spends at least half a page describing a layout of a city that never once came into play later in the book. Perhaps this is a set up for a future battle in another book but for me it seems like filler in a book that was already at an appropriate length without.

This book leaves you confused 85% of the time, never knowing what exactly is going on or why it is happening. There is no foundation on which to build an epic story.

I appreciated the ambiguity of who was the protagonists as well as the the political intrigue, but I spent half the book wondering how any of this would tie together and it never did. Perhaps it will later in the series but I will not stick around to find out.

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