While at times this book had my complete attention, in the end I found that the story left a lot to be desired. Though there were some rather intriguing lead ups to supposed important characters in the story, Hawke failed to follow through on them. I expected an extremely important role to be played by this Gorgon character that is mentioned quite often, but he is handled quite lamely. There, also, is more than enough background to keep you bogged down and expecting a point to it. Most of the time the story seems more like a history lesson of Cerilia. There are rare occasions of rather enjoyable story lines, and in the end a quite interesting battle sequence, but even that ends in a pretty stupid way. Overall a pretty crappy story from somebody who has a MA in English and actually teaches SciFi and Fantansy writing.