I don’t know how to explain it but it took me a while to get the “hang” of this book. For the first ~40%, I couldn’t really tell what sort of book I was reading. The tone of the first half (“You’ve Got Mail”?) feels very different than the tone of the second half (war drama), but once I reached that halfway mark, I felt like the story found its stride and I began to really enjoy it.

This surprised me, considering how much I loved “A River Enchanted” which got an easy 5-star rating from me when I read it last year (still haven’t got around to the sequel). I felt like the writing in this one was wasn’t as strong, either. I still liked reading it, but it didn’t necessarily blow me away like I was expecting it to (and maybe that right there is the problem: I had my expectations way too high).