I enjoyed the primary trilogy for the most part. It was a short and not overly complex, which is what I expected out of the young adult classification.

I think a lot of fun could be had with the story, but the writing wasn’t strong enough to keep me interested the other books.

I mostly read it out of curiosity to see how it diverged from the television show that I’m about to finish up. I figured my kids may be interested in it also, so I wanted to give it a go.

I read most of it too, quite liked it, although the King of Scars and Rule of Wolves was much better than the original trilogy imo. Author did Nikolai dirty though, and “natural” monarchism there was pretty hard to swallow, which is part of why Nikolai was done dirty, since he had some democratic thoughts, but ultimately what prevailed is the military-magical junta.

Lives of Saints was half atrocious though. The text is ok, as full of senseless acts of violence and dubious logic as the real deal lives of saints, but the book is half going on illustrations, and here is the hard stop - all illustrations are in the bog standard western fantasy style, while they would need to be in orthodox icon style on which the book and entire setting openly is based.