This was a delightful read, as all of this series has been for me. The story unfolds like a puzzle, switching between three timelines, and Vlad's conversational style of telling his own story to an unknown listener really works for me. 

In this book, Vlad goes to war. It does an effective job of covering the confusion of battle and the experience of an infantry soldier but doesn't get too gruesome. A repeating theme is the innacurracy of memory. Several times Vlad points out that his memory doesn't make sense and things must have happened in a different order, but since it's all he knows it's all he tells us.