My issues from the first book still remain (ridiculously explicit sex scenes that read like a high-schooler wrote them, and obnoxious footnotes) but I still really enjoyed this one. Kristoff's language/style is a bit overblown at times, but his characters are great and the story/pacing were excellent. I've had the first and second books sitting on my bookshelf for years, waiting until the final book was near release (I don't read unfinished series now (thanks GRRM, Rothfuss)). So with the third book coming out in just a few weeks, I finally got to read these two. I'm glad they were worth the wait. There are some similarities in this series with Mark Lawrence's Book of the Ancestor series, but I'm gonna go out on a limb and say these are better. Here's hoping the concluding book is equally or more fantastic than the first two!