I almost abandoned this book a bunch of times during the first 400 or so pages. The plot was weak at best and the characters all seemed to have either 1) reached the end of their character arcs with nowhere left to go, 2) turned into caricatures of themselves, or 3) just gotten either boring or annoying.

Then all of a sudden, a plot appeared and the book got better! Until all of a sudden, everything seemed to happen at once, like he realized that he was running up against his page limit or something. And then...the book was over. I actually flipped back to see if I'd missed a page-- it felt that sudden.

I think the whole series would've been well served by some heavy editing and condensing...a trilogy might have been a better option.