It's hard to know what to say about this book. Line by line and scene by scene it's really beautiful. If it was a nonfiction book and all this stuff really happened, it would be five star because it's kind of amazing that a ten-year-old could be outwitting kings, even 7th century kings. But as fiction, it doesn't quite satisfy because there is no narrative arc that makes any sense. It's just... this scene happens and then this scene happens and she has a cool knife and a lot of cool jewelry and everything always works out great for Hild over hundreds of pages. It's too much like an escapist fantasy for me. If I was writing it, I would have started the story with what happened three or four pages from the end. Now there's a problem that isn't going to be solved by shoving a ring or a knife in somebody's face. That's a problem you could probably dig into for five or six hundred pages...