I really enjoyed this book. It's definitely heavily inspired by LoTR. In a nutshell it's almost like LoTR but with country bumpkin humans instead of hobbits. It's definitely slow-paced, but it didn't feel that way to me, and I drank it in. It was easy to sit back and enjoy it. The writing is just so good. I personally enjoyed it a lot more than Tolkien. That being said, this is the beginning to a very long series, so I guess I could change my mind. I read the ebook and switched between that and audio. The performance by Rosamund Pike was outstanding.