Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

So I just spent the entire day (starting at 10:00 am and now it's 2:00 am) reading this book and it completely blew me away!! I'm not very good at writing comprehensive reviews, so I'll just highlight two things that I really loved about this book that I think is missing from a lot of other really good fantasy works (the ingredients that make it go beyond five stars). 1) I really hate the endless pages of self-loathing that many fantasy authors feel compelled to write whenever heroes need to kill. It's a very important point to carry across that killing, even in the name of "good", is sometimes necessary, but never without an incalculable price. Necessity cannot alchemize an evil act into something other. The heavy handed way in which this is usually done in fantasy fiction is when the hero rails ceaselessly against their own actions, decrying themselves as monsters, at which point they are embraced by some love interest who tells them that they are really a good person after all. It just always seemed to me that such self loathing is unbecoming in a hero since it's purely a selfish feeling that doesn't help anyone else. I can usually put up with this for like 20 pages but when it becomes a recurring theme, I get really annoyed. There's none of this in this book. I'm not sure exactly how the author managed to convey it, but there's a certain sense of dignity about Vaelin that tells you that he feels the weight of the lives he's taken without him resorting to whining (so he actually whines for about 2 paragraphs before he essentially gets slapped and told to stop feeling sorry for himself). 2) The author has a real gift for introducing plot details that take a while to understand (adding flavor to the story along the way) but which are satisfactorily resolved in the end (very few loose ends here). My favorite was the story of the "Witch's Bastard" which we are introduced to halfway in the book. At first, I had no idea what the story was supposed to mean in the context of the plot, but I think by the end, I could make a pretty good guess, and trying to interpret the story really allowed me to see everything that happened in a new light (very cool!). Please, please get this book. It was absolutely awesome! Best fantasy I've read in the past five years.