I am slowly (very slowly) reading my way through the shortlist of the Mythopoeic awards, which goes back to the 1970s. All three books in this trilogy made it onto the shortlist of their year but none of them won. It was a bit of a slog, to be honest, although in all fairness the jump in quality after the first - dreadful - volume was significant. Epic fantasy can be a hard sell for me sometimes, and certainly that's a factor here, but more relevant, I think, was the lack of convincing women characters. Hell, there's barely any women here at all, and those who do make it onto the page are barely sketched out supporting roles. Kurtz is clearly capable of a more fleshed-out characterisation when it comes to her male characters, but if I'm going to wade through a thousand odd pages of epic fantasy I want more women to keep my interest. Actual women, not the cut-outs here.