I ended up losing this book partway through and not really losing much sleep over it. I think that part of this is that I heard so many overwhelmingly wonderful and glowing reviews for this book that I just sort of felt a little underwhelmed when I started. I think that losing it was probably a stroke of luck, as I enjoyed this book a great deal more when I re-discovered it a few days ago. 
 This is pretty solidly normal UF fare for the majority of us nowadays, but I seem to remember that for the time period this was somewhat different to what was coming out. We had our Gritty Female UF Protagonists, but most of them were along the lines of Anita Blake, who spent more time wangsting over her personal life and identity. Others were solidly in the romance category, meaning that any personal issues were usually secondary to having hunka-hunka burning love going on. Some of them even had the gritty-ness of the heroine solved with a dose of Vitamin P.(view spoiler)[ Although in all fairness, many books have the main character's personal issues somewhat smoothed over or outright solved with a little nookie from someone of the opposite gender. (hide spoiler)] I might be thinking of the wrong time period, but books where the romance didn't come in until later volumes were fairly rare. 
 That's probably why so many people latched on to Rardin's Jaz Parks character: she wasn't closed to romance, but it wasn't the basic focus of the character or series. What also pushes Jaz as an interesting character even today is that she's likable. There are a lot of authors who, in trying to make a gritty heroine, make their lead heroine into a completely unlikable bitch of a person. L.L. Foster's Gabrielle Cody is probably the best example of where making someone completely unlikable and unsympathetic really backfires on you. You can always turn them around, but a lot of times people tend to lose interest in following on with the series. 
 But I digress. The basic thing is that on the second attempt at finishing the book, I can understand why people liked the book so much. I wasn't as overly taken with the book and character as I wanted to be, but I like it enough that I'll start reading the next book in the series since I bought a lot of the series outright. (I think I have the first 4 books.) It's something I'd recommend, in any case.