I would have sworn that I had reviewed--or at least rated--this book back when I first read it in 2009, but apparently not. I would further have sworn that I rated it three stars and that my primary complaint was an overabundance of exposition. And considering it was first published in 1993, that wouldn't have been a particularly rare flaw in a book of its time--fantasy as a genre was just coming into its own--Robert Jordan had just started publishing his series, and A Game of Thrones was still a few years down the road, with the Malazan Book of the Fallen not out until the late '90s. 
 But I've come back to this first book of The Wars of Light and Shadow now in 2017 thanks to a book club read here on Goodreads. I took an extra month or two to finish it compared to the book club, but so it goes, and I'm reading it with the benefit of having read the subsequent volumes, and knowing where the series is going, I was prepared to read it in a different way. Seeing all the things that this novel sets up, there's a richness that I didn't recognize on my first reading of the series. There's a lot going on in this novel that doesn't really bear fruit until later in the series. 
 But I didn't feel, this time, that the problem was too much exposition. Instead, it was more subtle than I could have realized on a first read. Now, there's still a sense in which you could say the novel is overwritten: Wurts has a prodigious vocabulary, and not only is she not afraid to use it, at times she seems almost afraid of not using it. But ultimately this is a stylistic choice, and a perfectly valid one. In fact, it's arguably the choice that best aligns with the world she's creating: a world that at it's best is imbued with a deep richness, a magical world that, at least when human beings and wraiths aren't mucking it up, is filled to overflowing with meaning and magic. 
 Wurts is a unique voice in fantasy with a vision that--though a reader will not see it all here--is as rich and significant as anything in the genre.