I picked up this book because it had a girl with a sword on the cover, and I have long been a fan of Tamora Pierce and her ilk. I was a bit disappointed by the story, though. If you're just looking for a classic Arthurian-style knight-adventurer story with a female protagonist, this may answer very well. If you want a story about a young girl kicking butt with more modern sensibilities, you may want to look elsewhere. The author also used a lot of archaic language and made some questionable grammatical choices in places, which I, as a fairly well-read adult, had occasional difficulty deciphering. Some of the vocabulary is well beyond the average 9 to 12-year-old reader, who would seem to be the book's intended audience. That said, I would probably have liked the story more if I had first read it at 12 than I do having first read it as an adult.