Excellent book. Erikson may not be quite as good a writer as George R. R. Martin, but he's plenty good enough to hold the rapt attention of this reader. I have just Amazoned the other seven novels in the series that have been published thus far, and I look forward to many (many!) hours of deaf-to-the-world reading.

Concerning some of the comments of other reviewers: "Gardens of the Moon" is complex and is definitely sink or swim at the outset (but who wants to be spoon-fed anyway?). The beginning is only slow-paced in comparison with the end, and the end is both much more satisfying than in your average multi-book series and also completely appropriate for a book in which the two-faced God of chance has such a central role (i.e., for my money it is not pat). The world-making is superb, the characters are good enough, the names are great, and the poetry is indeed awful.

There are a great many writers of bad fantasy out there, so many in fact that I more or less gave up on the genre for a while. I'm glad I decided to give Erikson a try.