Overall, this is an OK book. If you like the Valdemar chronicles enough to read all of the books, you'll probably enjoy it. It's not badly written. It's not great. It has a vastly different feeling than the other Valdemar books. I don't like the Shin'a'in as much as I do the Heralds and Tale'edras, and I missed them terribly. The book is also written almost like more of a series of short stories rather than a building story, which made it feel as though the characters lost some development to me.