3.5/5 
 This was weirdly paced. There was less and less action as the book went on. However I got more and more interested as the book went on too. I'm not so fond of the first part of this book, too many things happen while we don't actually know anything about the characters yet and the world... and we don't really care..? 
 Also there's some time jumps that could have been handled better. Like at some point there's a 6months time jump at the beginning of a new chapter but it doesn't say how long it has been, it sounds just like another new chapter and it all left me pretty confused. 
 I liked the characters and somehow I ended up enjoying the love story even though I wasn't fond of the instalove going on there. At 40 I'm not sure you really would ask someone to marry you after 5 days, but fine. 
 In the end, I did enjoy myself reading this, especially for the last 150 pages pr so. I will read Barrayar soon.