My recommendation for this book: stay away. My 12 year old son is a huge fantasy fan, so I bought this for him after hearing all the hype. He gave it back to me after reading about 100 pages and asked if it was too late to return it for our money back. I figured it couldn't be that bad, so I began reading iti myself. It is. This book is simply poorly written, horribly derivative of quite a few other fantasy titles (I used to read a lot of fantasy to my son when he was younger), and simply not a very good story. I'm glad so many other people seem to like it (although I'm stumped as to what they see in it). I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone however.