Astrid Hawk

Starting to feel constrained by the 5-star rating scale. I also gave Peach Blossom Spring 4*, but it was a much more artfully written book that did a fantastic job of really bringing the sounds and colors and smells of mid-century China and Taiwan to life. I wanted this book to bring Viêt Nam to life for me in a similar way, but it didn't. Perhaps because the author is herself Vietnamese and English is not her first language. Though to be fair, the writing itself didn't give that away, and I loved the elements of Vietnamese phrases and transliteration woven through it.

All that aside though, I love/hated how much this book haunted me - which made me want to finish it quickly, to get the pain over with. It made me feel guilt and anger for things I hadn't done and wasn't alive for. It made me wonder why my parents never spoke of these issues. It made me understand why my Vietnamese friends and their families always welcomed me on the one hand but still kept a veil between us - even though my generation had nothing to do with any of it.
The ending had a lot of resolution in it, but also left a lot unresolved at the same time. There was always a sense that life was a series of key turning points punctuated by periods of false calm, facilitated by lies and stories told to survive. And although there was a sense of healing, and maybe even some hope, in the ending, there was also a key message that some things would never be truly resolved, and that the truth was often worse than the not-knowing.

Didn't like this one as much as the previous one - the crime solving part moved a lot slower. As is typical for Sanderson, there was a dramatic acceleration at the end, with a bit a gut-punching twist. Although I didn't enjoy Marasi's character development, and I found Wax a bit flat in this one, Wayne was even more entertaining, and I found that I'd missed TenSoon. I also enjoyed that Sanderson decided to challenge the goodness, or right-ness, of deities (even benevolent ones) in this book.

If someone doesn't enjoy Mistborn novels then... I don't know, you're a bore I guess. Like I said in my midway update, I waited to read this because I didn't think I'd like it after falling in love with the first trilogy - but there was really no need to wait. It's a different society and characters, yes, but it still works and is just as enjoyable. Plenty of action and mystery-solving - where the original Mistborn novel was a heist novel from the perspective of the robbers, this was a heist and kidnapping story from the perspective of the lawkeepers. Religion and dystopian elements are still present, though less so in this novel than in the first trilogy - just enough to bring the world to life. To be honest I didn't love the characters quite like I enjoyed Vin and Kelsier, but Wax and Wayne are still well-drawn and fun to follow, and with 3 more novels to go in this arc, I may fall in love with them yet. For those who didn't care for the anachronistic speech in the first arc - yes, it's still present in this arc, maybe even more noticeable. However, I just don't find it a major detractor.

I was sent this book in a “mystery book box” because I wanted to try to branch into other genres... and I was pretty dubious about reading it once I opened the box. It took me almost a year to work up the courage to crack it open - but once I did I really enjoyed it. Although my lifestyle and personality are nothing like Dan's (the author's), I really enjoyed his sense of humor that shone through the book, despite its heavy subject matter. I even had some chuckle-out-loud moments at some of his gay and political humor. If anyone else has dealt with psychological/mental illness in their close friends/family - there may be some triggers in here, but they are handled extremely well, and did not make me put the book down. In fact, Dan's story gave me hope that there can be happy endings even when the mental illness seems unsolvable.

See the tags for what I thought of this one: very disappointing, completely unlikeable main characters (actually... I think all the characters were unlikeable and airheaded, main or not). The small flashes of Sri Lankan culture and society (messed up and class/image-based though it might be) were enjoyable, but I couldn't stand any of the voices of the narrators/main characters. (The two main characters both basically had the same voice anyway.) None of the decision-making of any of the characters really made any sense, and the details of their histories and motivations were revealed in convenient bits to make the ending feel like a big plot-twist/curtain reveal that ultimately just felt rushed and contrived. Unfortunately, if the reader had had the whole story all along, none of the events leading up to the big reveal/finale would have made much sense at all... very little really held together. Couple the feeling of being deliberately misled by the author with suffering through 300+ pages of clearly insane, deranged narrators and incidental characters with zero intelligent thought to any of them... this was a pretty miserable read. But at least it moved quickly.

I chose this book because I knew very little about Chinese history in the first half of the 20th century, and I really love historical fiction novels that are well-researched and realistic depictions of characters' lives during real historical cultural periods. This book was fantastic in that regard and did not at all disappoint. A family migration story at its heart, it weaves the power of verbal storytelling into the narrative in a way that does not feel at all contrived or overly spiritual, and the characters are all fantastically drawn - even those who we later discover the author didn't really know at all and had to fill in her own details for. Many of the events that the characters migrate through and live through are events that shaped modern political and social conflicts that still exist today, and as an American, reading this book gave me a much better appreciation for the rich sights, smells, sounds, and sensory chaos of Chinese and Taiwanese culture... and also some of the unseen troubles they faced even after migrating to the US (which again, still affect modern immigrants today).

I was also happy to read the author's note at the end that revealed that the book was semi-family-biography and autobiography (her autobiographical character does not make an entrance until the final portion of the book, but it's clear from her note who she is in the story).

The only reason I don't give this one 5* is because I have to reserve 5* for those truly fantastic books I would read over and over again over my lifetime. This one is still a must-read - especially for citizens of the Western world who have gaps in their education and cultural understanding.

This book disappointed me - but maybe it shouldn't have given that it wasn't way off from the first book... the material just didn't appeal to me as much in this one. There was a heavier focus on 80s pop culture nostalgia and less on geek culture. Several chapters devoted entirely to a Prince-gasm in the middle of the book especially lost me. I nearly quit when, 80 pages in, all we'd done for the most part was explore the main character's sniveling regret over his poor life choices. The characters made juvenile and inexplicable decisions and remarks in that opening 20% of the book that really annoyed me. Then when we finally got to the main plot and into the real scavenger hunt, it felt highly contrived - I kept looking up from the pages to ask myself “but why are they bothering with this?”. At this point I would have given it 1-2 stars, but once they got into the shard hunt it was more enjoyable and felt more like the fast-paced, VR, whimsical story I was expecting. The big “idea” of the book came at the very end, and felt rushed. It's a big concept to examine in sci-fi/spec fic, an especially ambitious undertaking to address in a lighter, faster story like this one, and I felt that the author was in a hurry to wrap things up and didn't give it the full attention it needed.

I hated the faerie stuff... Yes, Bast's questionable motives included, but primarily the Felurian stuff... but still, the story kept me reading, so I have to rate it accordingly. I just hope it doesn't turn into a Robert Jordan saga... I mean, how exactly is he going to take a ~16 year old boy to ~40 year old broken down innkeeper in one more book?

I devoured this book in spite of myself - couldn't stop reading even though the characters are deliberately annoyingly naive. I think the “hook” is a brilliant combination of letting the reader in on part of a secret and forcing us to watch the characters painfully catch up in discovering it, while still maintaining the rest of the larger secret, allowing the (much more knowledgable, much more experienced) reader to experience some revelations that only the characters can make. As dystopian stories go, this one is far lighter than most, and the ending is both happier and more conclusive than many. The book ends with hope, rather than the typical choice main characters in dystopias have to make between compromising their beliefs and burying their sense of injustice to live in a familiar place, or wandering forever alone with their convictions in a dismal “outside” world. I think I was a little disappointed in the easy, happy ending - I guess I just like my own sense of futility to be confirmed sometimes. But this book wasn't about futility like most in its genre, and the story was definitely riveting. I can't help thinking that this story was meant to be more a parable for a corporation than for a society though. Everything from the evil IT to the “you want outside, you get it” mentality just reminds me of all experience working for big companies.

Meh. Took 300 pages to get any momentum going, and while the author seems to have honed her craft a bit better in terms of wording and situational awareness, she spent way too much time in this book bludgeoning me with the rift between traditional and liberal values when it comes to women and society. Not to mention the “touched by death” stuff at the climax... just a bit carried away. Pun intended.

For some reason I found this one far more enjoyable than the first one. Despite her continued tendency to keep her main character in a perpetual cycle of action->near-death->sick-bed->recovery, the author seems to have warmed up to her mission and developed her craft a bit better in this one. Most situations are less awkward and contrived than in the first book, and though I still don't feel that I'm any smarter from having read it, or that I read a particularly well-designed story, it was nonetheless a great escape from real life.

A bit of an awkward start, and some definite awkward sections in the middle, but an overall fun read. The pacing was relatively consistent despite the inability of the author to convey the passage of time (sometimes candles burned halfway down in the space of a 30-second conversation, and entire battles were fought in a page... and the heroine spends an inordinate amount of time sleeping). In general, a somewhat cliche fantasy story but an enjoyable “just-for-fun” read.

[Read #3, July 2025]
I didn't note my thoughts down on this book the first 2 times I read it - once as a teenager, and then later as a young adult.

As a teenager, I loved dystopian stories for the secrets; the system-taken-as-fact that is clearly so dysfunctional to the reader's eyes but just the way of life for the narrator; the protagonist's slow journey to revelation, waking up to the fact that their world is full of wrongness. I enjoyed the emotional arc of such stories - the build of discomfort as more and more “wrongness” is revealed, then the increasing sense of danger as the protagonist starts pulling back the curtain and is thus in danger of being a victim of the regime, and finally the victory of truth over lies, humanity over machine, emotion over transaction. Looking back, I suppose it's ironic that I enjoyed dystopian stories in the same way that any of those stories' regimes' propaganda might have tried to mis-represent my own life, but I never applied what I read to current life.

The Handmaid's Tale is a bit different from the formula I enjoyed as a kid - our protagonist and narrator, Offred, grew up to adulthood during “the time before”. She's under no illusions about what's wrong with the system she lives in, about what's been taken from her. She spends long paragraphs reminiscing, in a sort of detached way that indicates how the process has psychologically wounded and changed her, about everyday things she remembers. There is a constant, explicit contrast in the book between Then and Now, and she's under no illusions about the regime she lives under, from its euphemisms to its violence. On the one hand, it robs me of teenager me's favorite part - the slow, horrifying reveal and then the triumph of truth and knowledge. On the other hand, with all the regime's dirty secrets known up front, at allowed me to consider an aspect of regime changes like this that I didn't as a teenager: the psychological impact of simultaneously holding the knowledge that unspeakable acts have been committed against you, and having accepted life as it is.

When I read the book as a teenager, I was more interested in things like how the rules worked, the contrast between the Before and After, and what would happen to the characters. In fact, I don't remember much about that first read, probably because I didn't even understand most of the euphemistic or oblique references to sexual acts, and some of the terms for classes of men and women that had their roots in real-life cultural issues that I didn't pay attention to.

When I read as a young adult, I understood things a bit better, but looking back, I still lacked a lot of human experience and awareness of the world outside myself. I was hyperfocused on out-performing at my first real professional job and kickstarting my career. I'd had some relationships, but my generation wasn't yet old enough to have dealt with divorce, abortion, having children (at least not in my personal sphere). I'd given up religion by then, but still felt like it was just something you could leave and ignore, failing to understand the political ramifications and pressures it creates (outside of the history I'd been taught, which all felt very remote). Although I knew the basics of women's suffrage history, women's reproductive rights history, separation of church and state, etc - this was during the Obama years in the US. All those issues felt like solved history, and I was too caught up in my own career and ambitions to realize that they were still very much relevant and in danger.

And now, today. 2025. This whole story feels pretty dated at this point in the details, but more relevant than ever in the large. It references real political actions that occurred in the '70s and '80s as if they were just a couple years ago - and while people are certainly still taking to the streets on foot with hand-printed signs and slogans, the slogans and the tone are different. The technology references are a mix of '80s technology plus a vague assumption of where fintech might go in the near future - and of course today the systems that people rely on on a daily basis are far beyond anything Atwood might have envisioned with the Compubank. (Arguably, with today's systems, people are even MORE vulnerable than they would have been with the fictional Compubank.). Much of the regime feels like it was combined from the worst bits of popular understanding of fundamentalist cults and soviet/communist regimes of the 1970s - it has an antiquated tone to it. And yet, there are loud voices on TV and social media today calling for very similar measures.

I appreciated, too, a lot more of the meandering stream-of-consciousness prose of the book. It is less a linear story as I remembered, and more of a revelation of a person undone. I appreciated more of Atwood's prose, mixing the blunt and mundane with poetic metaphor and mild sarcasm. The narrator frequently interrupts herself to reflect somewhat self-mockingly on old phrases she used to use (some of which we still use today) - for example, at one point she wryly reflects, while nervously waiting, that there is a difference between “what are you waiting for?” (meaning - don't wait) and “for what are you waiting?” (meaning - what are you anticipating?). At times it's disruptive, but it really gives the reader a clear view into the narrator's mind.

Offred isn't like the heroic protagonist of my favorite stories as a kid. She's broken; not resisting in any meaningful way, but in only small symbolic ways only noticeable to herself. And even then, her resistance is not noble, in the name of truth and love, but just in the name of making her existence slightly more bearable. Even when she starts engaging in more significant illicit behaviors, she does so at the compulsion of others - not in the name of undermining the regime or bettering life for anyone else. On the one hand, it's disappointing - I WANT her to be clever, using matches and butter and stolen dried flowers to somehow piece together a way to communicate with the resistance group, to be a force for knowledge and clarity and freedom. And she's definitely not that. On the other hand, the message is so much more powerful for all the things she doesn't do, and all the questions that go unanswered.

So... now that there's a sequel... should I read it? Or should I leave the mystery? The unanswered questions, leading vaguely into a dissatisfying future that probably looks a lot like our present? (I have very little self control when it comes to books... I'll probably read it. At least I've taken this moment to reflect, so Gilead-before-the-sequel is firmly memorialized.)

Recommended for all nerds, people who fancy themselves nerds, and people who want to understand fantasy without taking on GRRM or Robert Jordan. This was just a fun read, period. That said, though, I'm definitely in the first class I mentioned above, so this book was basically written for me.

I was born a bit late to really understand all the copious 80s references throughout the book, but I spent enough time on emulators and friends' old consoles to have sufficient perspective to enjoy the nuances of the story. It helps to understand what vector graphics look like, what crude haptics (e.g. “force feedback”) feel like, and how Dungeons and Dragons (or similar role-playing games) basically worked. But there were certainly enough contemporary references, like Pern, Firefly, etc to ground me.

I loved this book for so many reasons that I can't possibly list them all here. The book answers some burning questions, some you might not have known you had (but I've definitely asked them all at some point):
- In an immersive virtual reality, how do you go to school? how do you conduct business?
- Do you feel pain when someone hits you? Is a blow converted to actual physical damage?
- If your online presence is an alternate you, what are the ramifications of death?
- How do you police a virtual civilization? (Note - the author answers this question by avoiding the issue entirely. There are no laws in the OASIS. He does not get into why there is not rampant needless destruction, though there could be possible explanations.)

Don't look for anything too deep in this book - there is no mind-blowing ending (in fact it's quite predictable), and no existentialist agenda or some other philosophical analog. It's just pure fun with a happy ending that makes it even more fun. About halfway through the book, when the main character's avatar starts getting more advanced, the OASIS leaves the realm of a believable online system to a complete orgy of fantasy. At times it feels that the author makes up the system parameters as he goes along, but as wild and imaginative as he gets, he does manage to adhere to the basic parameters he establishes. Sometimes it feels like the kind of story you'd tell as a child, getting more and more hard to control, but for every grounding answer an adult asks, the child comes up with some reason the story would work. Some things are easy to imagine as a possible future of gaming, but others (like codes for producing odors, for example, and the sheer volume of data that is apparently sent instantaneously over fiber-optic connections for another) are clearly just fantasy. It doesn't really matter, though, because nerds want that stuff to exist, and we're willing to overlook the impossibilities in order to imagine this as a reality. Plus, the story moves along pretty fast, so there's no time to waste considering these things.

Normally I'd only give a book a 5 if I enjoyed it so much that I think I'd want to read it again. I'm not sure this book really has that much re-read value - it's not very complex, and the story and characters are simple but memorable. It's possible that on a re-read I'd understand more of the nostalgia references... but not much else. However, it's rare that I call up friends I haven't spoken to in awhile just to recommend a book - and I did that with this book. I think that in itself is enough to push the rating to 5 stars.

It's hard to know what to say about this book that hasn't already been said in hundreds (maybe thousands?) of reviews before me. So I'll keep it short.

I had trouble getting through the first 30-40% of the book - Salander was stuck in the hospital with no means of communicating with Blomkvist (and despite the fact that the author has kept them almost entirely apart since the end of book 1, I still like their interaction better than any other characters'), and the whole thing was feeling like a re-hash of book 2. Police faction against police faction against rogue reporters against the obvious villains, with no one really making any progress. Around the 40% mark, though, things got a lot better all at once - suddenly there's a fun little sub-plot involving Erika, Salander is once again back in the fray (even if from the hospital), and the various “good guy” factions suddenly grow some brains (and a pair) and stop cowering behind misinformation. Phew.

When the trial finally came around, I didn't want to put the book down because it was just such a relief to finally see “justice” being dealt (even if it was obviously coming). And the many snarky remarks in the trial were definitely fun to read. The end of the book was just... eh. But I wasn't really expecting any earth-shattering conclusion or twist, so I'm not complaining about it. It's always hard to conclude a story of such epic proportions in both a neat and engaging manner, and I'll settle for neat over engaging any day. At least all loose ends were tied up.

As for the mechanics - the writing style was the same as the previous 2 books (not a surprise) with very mechanical prose and terse, matter-of-fact descriptions. Dialogue scenes are numerous and much more interesting, except for the repetitive use of “he said” and “she said” (no one ever seems to exclaim, comment, mutter, etc). There are some strange grammatical pet peeves that come up throughout the series as well - for instance, “no one” is consistently spelled “no-one”. It doesn't affect the book at all, and I don't really expect it to bother the general reader, but I'm weird enough to be slightly annoyed by things like that.

I still wonder how much I really learned about Swedish culture. If I were to take everything at face value, I'd assume that I can expect that on a visit to Sweden I'll get coffee with every meal and every time I meet someone (so basically every waking minute), sandwiches for every meal except dinner (and even sometimes then), crime at pretty much every small town, warehouse, woods, and subway tunnel, and casual sex with many and various partners. It seems that half of Sweden is single and happy to be so. Aside from the parts that deal with prostitution and rape, the portrayal of sex in these books is unique among other books I've read. Sex is not erotic, disgusting, or in fact earth-shattering in any way, though it features quite prominently in various ways throughout the series. On the other hand, sex is portrayed as a recreational activity akin to going to see a movie in the theater (but obviously with a bit more physical stimulation than mental). Relationships are given the same straightforward treatment most of the time - characters simply walk up to each other and tell each other how they feel and what they think they want. Incredible. If only sex and relationships were so easy in the real world. But maybe they are in Sweden? On the other hand, it made Blomkvist falling in love seem about as believable as Bond falling in love. No. Please just leave him as a player. It made my world feel much more secure that way.

I wasn't thrilled with this book, but I didn't hate it either. Every now and again I'd find myself getting drawn in... only to be suddenly and rudely shut out by a shift in narrative perspective, or by the author's seeming unwillingness to maintain interest in any one plotline long enough to finish it with the respect it deserved.

I read several other reviews that called out the choppy pacing as the main detriment to their enjoyment. To be perfect honest, I'm not really sure that I understand what choppy pacing is if this book is supposed to exemplify it. I actually thought the pacing was consistent enough to be predictable - action scenes went quickly, and they were interspersed with chapters of “set up” - mostly private meetings between characters in which the next phase of the plot was revealed piece by piece through each character's eyes. I thought that part was fine - there's no reason that a book, even a fantasy novel, needs to start off slow and uniformly accelerate to the final climax. In fact, having the brief periods of action throughout the book actually gave me something to look forward to each time I got bored. I found the pacing too predictable to be “choppy”.

But a lot of the book didn't work for me. As I began thinking about how to write this review, I thought about how I'd summarize the book. And that was where I realized the major flaw: there's no way to summarize the book concretely without giving away the entire story. The book tackles too many aspects of the fantasy world - magic of all types, political intrigue, feudal war, class war, abuse, poverty, excess, religion, legend, etc - without giving any one aspect its proper due. The end result is that the world feels incomplete; the reader is left with very little sense of the history that seems like it should be important, and the political structure is very muddled so that when the big upheaval does come, it's hard to remember who is siding with who and what various factions' motivations are supposed to be. Similarly, little information is given about what magic can do, so each new trick that shows up is a surprise to the reader and seems like the author made it up on the fly to get a character out of a particular jam. A little more information up front about common magical items and capabilities would add more credibility to the magic users in the story - it's far more interesting to see characters use tools like magic in creative ways rather than just see new tools invented on the spot.

The back of the book says just about everything it can say - it begins with the somewhat trite “A good killer has no friends” and then goes on to explain that Azoth has no choice but to abandon his old life and become the apprentice to the greatest assassin in the world. The book does start out centered around Azoth/Kylar, but as it evolves, most of the action and the weighty themes have little to do with him and his little coming-of-age tribulations. It feels as if he's thrust into the middle of major events in a completely unbelievable fashion, as if the author is grasping at straws to make sure the hero of the book is somehow involved in all the major events. To me, that made everything seem ill-thought-out - like the author had some master plan for the boy and the plot (and in fact he clearly did), but didn't know how to make it remarkable or dramatic enough without big exaggerated battles.

Many other minor things bothered me as well, though it took me awhile to understand what they were as I read. One was the constant shifting perspective. While I recognize that this was necessary to make the plot come together, since there was no way Azoth/Kylar could see everything, I've seen it executed much better (GRRM's technique of separating chapters comes to mind). In this book, perspective, setting, and plot thread can switch mid-chapter with no more warning than an extra line break between perspectives. What was more infuriating, though, was the seemingly random injection of new perspectives by minor characters - people who had never even been named in the book before and wouldn't take much part again. This is a technique often used in movies when introducing a villain - the crime the villain is committing is seen through the eyes of someone (usually a security guard of some kind) who is about to become a victim. It bothers me in movies, but I can see the use there. In books, it doesn't work at all, particularly if the character is not about to become a victim at all, but is just loaning his eyes and thoughts temporarily for the author to fill some pages.

Finally (and this is a minor point to be sure), the language of the book fell short for me. The style frequently slipped between neutral prose to contemporary slang, which seemed very jarringly juxtaposed with the medieval setting.

I feel a bit hypocritical writing what is without a doubt my most scathing review to date, for I'm sure I wouldn't have done any better trying to write a fantasy novel (or any kind of novel for that matter). It's so easy to find flaws in others' work that is by virtue of being on paper infinitely better than any work I've never written. But still, this book really disappointed me, and I felt the need to quantify and justify that feeling.

Book candy - a quick, easy read with a captivating story, action, and emotion. In terms of dystopian and societal reflection, it didn't go very deep... but then again, it didn't really need to.

No time for a full review, though I had many thoughts along the way that I'd love to be able to put into words. The bad - the story drags quite a bit in the middle while minor characters are squabbling and being established for seemingly no good reason and Salander is entirely absent for over 100 pages. The book could also have been significantly shorter if Larsson did not repeatedly beat the reader over the head with certain details - I actually threw the book down in anger at one point after being told AGAIN that there was a discrepancy between Salander's reputation among her friends and her official psychological record. And of course the book suffers a bit from the same dry, robotic writing style that is used in the first book in the series - it reads almost like one long police report, which may be intentional, or may be a side effect of the translation. But clearly, the good must outweigh the bad, as evidenced by the fact that I finished it in 3 days, 2 of which were full work days. I just kept turning pages, eager to see Salander's next reappearance and to find out what mess she was going to dig herself into or out of next.

Read this in English as a child and somehow never read the original version even in French class. Looking forward to experiencing it in the author's original prose. (Goodreads does a terrible job with managing multiple-language editions of the same book... hope I can make this work.)

I decided to go to Paris 30 minutes before the plane departed, and this was the only Paris guidebook in the airport bookstore. I figured something was better than nothing (and I was right).

The good:
- Quick synopses of most must-see attractions including open hours
- Organization by neighborhood to help itinerary planning
- Outlined walking tours for various interests

The bad:
- Lots of wasted space listing hotels and shopping malls. They didn't want to list all hotels in an area, and they wanted to get a good price cross-section, with the result that you're left with meager and incomplete information just taking up space. I just skipped every hotel section and opted to pay for an hour of internet usage at the CDG airport instead to find a hotel online.
- Too many pictures for the sake of having pictures. I know it's a color, high-res book... but it would have been better if all the pictures had been quality photos of the various places I was considering. Some were... but others were just poor-quality images of standard, generic tour-guide fare.
- The tear-out map. Way too small. It would have been better to have separate maps for the metro and streets, since both ended up being inadequate trying to share space.

As a commentary on socialism, this is a fantastic thought-provoking essay. As a novel - the book would be better as a short story given its lack of development and repetitive descriptions. The majority of the story happens in the final quarter of the book, almost feeling as if Orwell has given up on both the story and his characters having already made the bulk of his points in essay form earlier on. Still, I'm tempted to give it 4 stars because I can't resist a dystopian book.

I made it! Once I plowed through the first 600-700 pages, it was really quite good - although as others have said in prior reviews, it takes about 900 pages to actually get the disconnected story threads to start coalescing - and that, in my opinion, is too long for this particular world and story, which costs the book a star. Although I was happy with Sanderson's treatment of the characters at the conclusion (not the frustrating sensationalism of GRRM's style, for example), I did not enjoy being bludgeoned with their motives for so long. There are only so many repetitions of their internal struggles with concepts and morals that a reader needs to grasp the point, and this book far exceeded that number for every character. That said, the long walk did make the climax that much more emotional.

Some readers would probably not enjoy the jumbled perspective in this narrative. For some characters, their stories are told bidirectionally - their present-day thoughts and actions are recorded while their pasts are gradually explored, mostly chronologically, intermingled with the present. For most characters, though, we just get hints of character-shaping events in their pasts to describe their present-day actions, and the narrative switches between characters nearly every chapter. The frequent changing or perspectives in the narrative perhaps helped keep the timeline more clear across a vast world, but also served to string the reader along in a frustrating manner, always leaving the reader with the sense that there was something else they were supposed to know about each character to understand them, but knowing we would have to wait several chapters, and in some cases hundreds of pages, to have a chance to find out more. I believe it was that lack of focus on a given storyline, coupled with repetitive descriptions of internal struggles and uninteresting action scenes, that made me stop reading the book entirely on my first attempt.

All that said, though, I do think the book has convinced me to continue with the series. I was on the fence until the last 150 pages or so, which is a very long time to have uncertain enjoyment of a 1250-page book. The plot twists toward the end were handled well - enough foreshadowing to give the reader an idea that things weren't adding up, but not so much to ruin the surprises completely. There was very little that could be construed as completely out of character for a given actor, so the reader doesn't feel misled. In the end, I guess that yes, it does leave me wanting to find out more about what happens to these people, to the world, to their society. Do they get answers to their unanswered questions? Are they doomed to repeat past mistakes and suffer death and destruction because of their previous failures to pass down ethical codes or accurate history? And most importantly of all, do I trust Sanderson to treat his readers well and handle those questions in the sequels? I don't know - but I guess he's earned my trust for another round.