This is a series I've been on the fence about trying for a while--I've heard so many good and bad things about it, especially with the main character being a hateful boy with no redeeming qualities. The part that made me decide to go ahead and plunge in is Jorg is unapologetically horrible. At no point does he try to justify his actions as anything other than the greedy, selfish actions they are. At no point does the book try to go "okay, look, he murders people...sure...but they're only BAD people so it's okay to like him" (looking at you, Dexter). No, he's awful and quite often I found myself rooting for his enemies, even though some of them were also awful people. It made for a pretty interesting reading experience, that's for sure. Anyone who does need a main character that is likable probably would want to just avoid this series completely.

I was pleasantly surprised by the setting. I had been expecting this to be the usual fantasy fare where the author had created an entirely new world for their quasi-medieval Europe story but early on it was apparent this was some kind of actual Europe setting. As I was puzzling out all the inconsistencies of this actually being Europe of the past, the hints of this being a post-apocalyptic setting started trickling in. I really enjoyed all the little details about the Builders and the different ways this was incorporated into the mythology of this new society. I don't expect I'll learn much more about what caused everything to regress beyond the few details here, but I was pretty happy with the set-up this did manage to give through ancient documents and whatnot.