Searching for a quick read with less than 250 pages, I came across this one recommended by a fellow blogger. Its the kick off to quite a long series in which subsequent books do increase in length. A male protagonist who proclaims to be a fantastic thief is the narrator of this historical fantasy. Pacing for me, felt quite slow. It took quite a while for the story to really get going and even when it did action wasn't the primary focus. Instead, the bulk of this story involves questing with a main goal of stealing Hamiathes' Gift - a stone of immortality. As to be expected the characters spent most of their time traveling eating and telling historical myths. I found the myths to be complex and didn't always fully understand everything about them. They involved numerous gods and mystical lands. So many different queens, kings and gods were introduced I didn't really do the best job of keeping track of all of them. The lineage of the main characters and the lay of the land also was something I never really grasped very easily. In no way was this due to bad writing, its just more or less a fault of my inability to comprehend. For me, this was more of a plot driven story than a character driven one. Many have called it an adventure story or historical fantasy. I'm also not sure I totally connected with the main character. Even though he was a man, in numerous scenes he felt weak and almost feminine to me. He wore his hair long and was known to braid it, too, so this didn't bode well to change my vision of him. Some of his more positive attributes were his ability to tell a good story, his intelligence and his cunning. I didn't appreciate his cowardice or how he tended to run from danger than to face it. As the story progressed, he did prove to be a lot tougher than he initially let on. I guess he would be best described as tenderhearted. He really didn't like to kill and chose to be a thief because he wanted to avoid being a soldier. The world building in this story felt complex to me. I'd have to pay a lot more attention if I really wanted to understand it all, especially the political pieces. This story has no romance, which is perfectly fine with me. It does have primarily all male characters and it was sort of nice to see how they began to devolope relationships with each other as the story progressed. What I really liked about this story is it totally could be read as a stand alone. It wrapped up perfectly with just enough leading information for the reader to see plenty of possibilities for more story lie ahead.