The Vagrant

I love this book, the world the people and their story, stitched together with interesting prose. The setting feels believable and deep, crisp and brutal. Its dark and wonderful.

I felt things when I finish the book.

The good: poetic, melancholic, original background, very dark, solid world-building, interesting interaction between the antagonists. Very good start (first 25%), extremely good ending (last 25%).
The bad: somewhat simplistic, somewhat YA, over-ambiguous at times, over-Christian (forgive thy enemy... even when it is a bad idea), sluggish, even boring middle (50%), underdeveloped main character, too easily to defeat archenemies.
Liked the goat, though.
Enjoyed enough to read the sequel, but only moderately looking forward to it.

Initially I really wasnt that impressed with the book as it was very slow starting off. I persevered and things got a LOT better. The writing style of Peter Newman really appealed to me on these books and I am very happy that I continued on with this book!

An extremely far future world, a mysterious lead with a remarkable sword....for the first dozen or so pages all I could think of was The Book Of The New Sun. Its not that book, of course, or even really an attempt at it. It turns out to be a proficient science fantasy, notable for some imaginative and well drawn bad guys. I had two biggish quibbles with it, namely that the prose style is unnecessarily opaque (again, not unlike Gene Wolfe, but without the sense I get from his books on first read that there is something there, I'm just missing it), and also that somehow, the balance of my enjoyment was off - I found much more to like in the quiet downtime moments than I did in the parts that advanced the plot or the set piece action scenes. Nevertheless, it's an encouraging debut, and I will read the author's next book.