Jacqie's Reviews > The Tempering of Men

The was the middle-bookiest of middle books.

I came into this series kind of ass-backwards. I read the third one first, loved it and then went back and read the first book in the series. Hm, looking at my reviews that was about one and a half years ago. Then I got to this book.

I figured my way out through the third book with no problems- characters and relationships made sense and the authors did a good job with letting me know who they were without anything feeling like an infodump. In this book, I couldn't figure out who anybody was, and I'd read the book in which they'd been introduced already! Eventually I started remembering some things, but it was not easy for me to get into the book, partly because of that.

The other reason was that not much happened. In my opinion, you could go directly from the first to the third book and not miss anything of importance. There's LOTS of trekking through the cold wilderness, being hungry and smelling horrible because you can't wash. Maybe that's your jam, but it's not mine. I suppose the theme of the books is "what are warriors good for when they've vanquished their enemy?" but I wasn't really interested in the answer to that question.

Also, Isolfr is really only seen at a distance. I liked him a lot as a character and missed him- the other characters didn't fill the void for me.