I'd kind of been toying with the idea of buying this book for a while. It was on the recommended shelf at my favorite local book store, but there was something about the cover that turned me off. However, recently I read an essay about (the new) Battlestar Galactica by Matthew Stover, and that intrigued me enough to pick up the book.

It's pretty good, but there's a couple of things that didn't work for me. First of all, it gets off to a pretty slow start. There's a lot of setup material to plow through, and it doesn't help that the main character starts off as grossly unlikeable. The other thing that irked me was its future Earth's sociopolitical system, which came off as a caricature designed solely to provoke outrage.

However, once you get past that, there's a lot of really good stuff in the novel. The bulk of the book takes place in "Overworld", a fantasy setting that reminded me quite a bit of China Mieville's work. It's a very gritty world, where things like elves and dwarves exist, but are nothing like the typical Tolkien-ish portrayal.

Another thing I liked about the story was the main character's moral ambiguity. We eventually root for him to succeed, but he does a lot of unpleasant things along the way. That was a nice change from the typical heroic fantasy good guy.

I found that about halfway through I had gotten pretty hooked on the story, and was reading it pretty intently, and ultimately the novel succeeds despite its slow start.

There's a sequel which I'm going to read soon, and I'm hoping that it smooths away some of the rough edges found in this novel.